#AdminPrintNightmare
On August 10, Microsoft posted a blog post about changes to the point and print. You can read the official story from here – https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2021/08/10/point-and-print-default-behavior-change/
After the August patches, standard users cant add any printers. This means that you need to pre-install all drivers on your workstations.
Their second blog post recommended installing print drivers remotely through Configuration Manager, but they didn’t include any other information on how to achieve it exactly.
In my case, I have one older print server with many different printers and drivers. The question is how to get these different drivers from print servers and pre-install these on different workstations?
PS! To point out that your environment can be different, and you may see different results.
Scenario
30+ printers with different drivers. We didn’t have the possibility to update all the drivers on the print server.
Solution
During my research, I discovered that in Windows, we have built-in utilities such as Printbrm.exe and PrintbrmUI.exe. This utility allows you to backup your installed printers and restores them as well (including drivers).
So I installed one test workstation and installed different printers from my print server. After that, I removed the installed printers and ran the PrintbrmUI.exe utility.
Exporting printers using PrintbrmUI.exe utility
Importing drivers silently using the Printbrm.exe
After the export, you should now have myprinters.printerExport file. Now you can use the Printbrm.exe utility from the command line to import these drivers into another machine, for example
- Printbrm.exe -f C:\myprinters.printerExport -r
If the import is successful, you can create a package in Configuration Manager and deploy the workstations you need.
Summary
We never thought that in August 2021, we would be engaged with such a project. This change in the Point and Print process causes a lot of administrative overhead for administrators because now they need to ensure that all print drivers are pre-installed on every workstation.
