Printers are pretty easy to deploy via Group Policy. It’s easy to configure a Group Policy Preference to deploy a printer, but there’s a few gotchas that may prevent the printer from actually getting installed client side.
The first thing to check is Event Viewer > Applications. If Group Policy attempts to add a printer but fails, it should be logged as a warning and give an idea on what the problem is. If you’re stuck – enable Group Policy Preferences Logging and Tracing for Printers, and see if you get more data.
For Windows 10, depending at what patch level you’re at, and what drivers the print server has, and if those drivers are packaged or not you’ll probably have to enable more policies to make printers deploy. If you don’t, you may see this error in Event Viewer: “Group Policy Object did not apply because it failed with error code ‘0x80070bcb The specified printer driver was not found on the system and needs to be downloaded.’ ”
There’s a lot of information out there on this topic – but generally, the main reason a printer won’t automatically install is because of UAC. If you try to manually install one of these printers, you’ll get the ‘Do you trust this printer’ warning, and even after continuing on that, the install may fail.
There’s two Group Policies to configure to get around this, which I found blogged at Systemcenterdudes so please read their post – but you need to enable these two policies:
Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Printers – Package Point and Print
Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Printers – Point and Print
In both of the policy settings, you may need to specifiy your print servers. It wouldn’t work for me until I did – and it’s a better security approach to do this anyway.
Once that was done, printers were then able to be installed automatically via Group Policy. There’s some other ways I’ve read to change how the drivers work, push out registry fixes etc – but to me this seems the simplest and safest approach (assuming it works for you too!).
If you’ve had a different experience or the above doesn’t work, please share!
YES! Thank you for this.
Ever since the dreaded Windows update from December 2016 that we haven’t been able to deploy most of our printers, because the driver wasn’t signed.
By enabling and properly configuring Point and Print, as well as Package Point and Print, now we can deploy all of our printers again!!
My help desk team is already really grateful for this hehe
Glad it helped someone else so quickly! Appreciate the feedback, especially that it worked :) Did you define the print servers or just turn it on for everything?
I defined the print servers in both configurations, just to be on the safe side, then did a “gpupdate /force” on my test VM and all my printers that previously didn’t install, all installed in a matter of seconds.
OMG, thank you for this post! Saved me a ton of time and my printers are deployed to my WIn7 and Win10 PCs
Glad to hear it, and thanks for taking the time to tell me :)
thanks for this article. I solved via using this.
Glad to hear it, thanks for sharing
HI Adam, thanks for this. I came to this after I had implemented these policies and succeeding. I thought I will add the comment that initially i was only setting the user side policies for point and print and they were not working. So then I found the computer side policies and enabled them I didn’t set the package point and pint setting.
Thanks to bloggers like yourselves to keep the MS windows world going round. you can’t easily find this information with Microsoft.
best.
Glad it helped you and really appreciate you took the time to respond – thanks!
All you need to do is disable “only use package point and print”. Worked perfectly for me
YESSS finally the printer automatically installed. Thanks alot man holy crap.
Glad it helped :)
THANK YOU ! THANK YOU ! THANK YOU!!! I was pulling last of my hair out with this
I do have an odd comment/question. I am fairly green so have some patience with me here.
I am having this issue deploying printers as well. In my computer configuration the point and print options are not there to disable. It only shows under user config.
We have a gpo set just for print driver validation at the top of our forest. Server 2008 r2 Domain controller, Server 2012 Print server, Windows 7 and 10 machines. & appears to work for the most part. ( minus older printer/drivers)
We are working towards full upgrade to 10 but if printers won’t deploy that is unacceptable.
Thank you for any input you can provide.
Thank you