1

folks. We are preparing to migrate thousands of PCs on our network from Windows 7 to Windows 10. I'm looking for an elegant way to preserve, or else backup and restore, user printer mappings (i.e. to network printers on a print server) through this process. We do have networked home directories, but doing a printbrm on each of thousands of PCs, many with multiple user profiles, isn't a great option.

I could probably gin up something in PowerShell to do this, given enough time, but I'm sure I'm not the first person wanting to do this. What other solutions are out there?

pants_towel
  • 61
  • 1
  • 3
  • 2
    Hmmm.... Deploying printers via Group Policy would save you all of this work. – joeqwerty Oct 24 '18 at 14:28
  • True. Problem is that we don't have good insight into which workstations need which printers. We are a huge site with thousands of PCs and users alike, and our AD isn't grouped by physical location in any way. We're trying to minimize our administrative overhead during this migration. – pants_towel Oct 24 '18 at 15:00
  • https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/printmanagement/?view=winserver2012r2-ps – joeqwerty Oct 24 '18 at 16:30

1 Answers1

1

Trying to minimize your administrative overhead would be using an alternate solution to manually exporting/importing printer mappings on thousands of computers. Assuming a few things:

  1. You have Active Directory Sites and Services configured with all of your sites and subnets.

  2. You know which printers exist in which location.

  3. This migration is being performed in stages, either by physical location or business unit.

You could fairly easily create and link site level GPO's to map the appropriate printers for the appropriate users/computers based on their site "affiliation".

You could work on this in parallel at the same time you're searching for a manual solution.

Addendum

I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but at what point do you start fixing the things that need fixing and start managing the environment in a more effective and efficient manner? I understand that it's a lot of work, but how long are you going to continue down this road? You've admittedly stated that things are a mess. When do you start cleaning up the mess? If not now, when? My entire point being that at some point you have to start fixing the things that need fixing so that you can be more effective and efficient in managing the environment.

All that being said, I don't have a solution for you other than to suggest, again, that you use Group Policy to accomplish this.

joeqwerty
  • 108,377
  • 6
  • 80
  • 171
  • We don't have granular sites set up in ADSS, nor do we have good insight as to which printers are where, unfortunately. It's kind of a mess. I don't think GPOs are going to be a viable solution here. – pants_towel Oct 24 '18 at 15:53
  • I feel you. I lack the privileges to do anything, as I'm just a tier 3/local sysad type. Larger configuration decisions are made and implemented way above my head and I'm just stuck working within those confines and maintaining the system as best I can. Leadership seems to be fine with just implementing the OS migration and then letting the desktop support folks (i.e. not me) deal with manually remapping printers for everyone. I'm trying to save us many many days of heartache, but I can only stay in my swim lane. – pants_towel Oct 24 '18 at 16:13