Chicago Endpoint Management User Group

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Using the Printer User Interface to Script Printer Installs 

Apr 07, 2008 02:02 PM

Our company just ran into this issue. We are undergoing a transition of employees from one section of the building to another section of the building. One of the challenges that we faced is getting the printers installed on the employees new locations. We used a combination of Altiris Software Delivery Solution and the Software Portal to publish printer install tasks to the end users to install the printers at their location.

I know some of you are probably saying, login scripts to do this, searching AD for printers, AD Group Policy, etc... Unfortunately, we did not have the time an resources from our internal staff that manages AD and login scripts to accomplish this. Plus our end users can't browse AD for printers. We decided to use an employee self help portal web page using the Altiris Software Portal and publish printers based on Department locations and the printers in the area.

The printer tasks in the software portal were all setup to to contain a package for each department location with no source files, and multiple programs for each package using a command line that references the Printer User Interface. You can set this up in DS as well to install a network printer provided you run the script with an account that has access to your printer servers.

An example of how we did this on the command line is shown here:

%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /n \\myprinterserver\myprintshare 

If you want to see the options for using this tool you can open a CMD Prompt and type in the following to see the help options for using this tool.

%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /? 

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Aug 27, 2008 10:31 PM

You are correct. There is no easy way to use this within the Deployment Server environment. DS does not allow you to run items as the logged-in user or within the user's context. I used this tool in conjunction with the Software Portal using Software Delivery Solution. This could also be setup to run as an individual software delivery job or as a software delivery task if you are using task server.
Nate Hudson
Senior Systems Engineer
West Bend Mutual Insurance

Apr 16, 2008 05:02 PM

Thank for the article nrhudson,
I tried to use the PrintUI script to map network printers to my users. However, i am having a hard time getting it to work through DS. the script works fine when i run it locally. it looks like it has to run using the current user's account and i cannot find an option in DS to do this. Any ideas?
Thank you much

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