Sanity check: Print Server upgrade
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Firstly, printers and I don't get on. I'm a completely novice! Anyway, here's the situation:
In our head office we have about 15 printers serving about 50 users. I setup a Windows 2003 Server to act as a print server and it's been doing fine for about 10 years. I haven't thought much about it. Obviously I need to kill that server asap, so I figured I'd just set up a new print server running 2012R2.
Also, I don't currently push out printer settings via group policy. So new printers are added at the client, either by the user themselves, or by me. I'd like to make this neater by using group policy instead. I really don't want to visit 50 workstations to configure their printers manually. The users are already in groups in AD (accounts, sales, R&D etc), so I can just apply these groups to specific printers, right?
I don't want to do this project myself as I hate printers. So I've asked my vendor to do it.
How long do you think a job like this should take, roughly? The figure in my head is different to my vendors and I was wondering who is being unrealistic
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@Carnival-Boy said:
The users are already in groups in AD (accounts, sales, R&D etc), so I can just apply these groups to specific printers, right?
Printers aren't assigned by User/Group they are assigned by OU. I suppose you could use WMI filtering but, the more you do that the more you slow down group policy processing time.
If you have your OUs setup by location and department (as the norm) you should just be deploy the printers in GPOs within that OU.
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I'd say 2 hours at a minimum, 2 hours of "I can't print anymore"
4 hours of engineer time at maximum even with all the snags in the world. 1 hour if everything goes off without a hitch.
Is this going to be done during the day or during the evening when the business is not using them? That will affect the cost.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
I'd say 2 hours at a minimum, 2 hours of "I can't print anymore"
Huh? You can do this without any down time. Leave the old server up. Configure the new. Push out GP to add the new Printer from the new server and remove the old printers. The old doesn't need to be removed til the new is up and running.
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Or you could recycle the print server's name and not have to worry about it. Just re-install all of the printers and share them again with the same permissions... Then you could do it after hours or something.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Huh? You can do this without any down time.
What do you do when the group polices don't apply correctly to some of the devices? You need to reboot or force a GP update on them.
You can't mess around with people's ability to print and not expect a few of the machines not to have problems. I've rarely seen group policy be 100% effective on all machines. -
@Breffni-Potter said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Huh? You can do this without any down time.
What do you do when the group polices don't apply correctly to some of the devices? You need to reboot or force a GP update on them.
You can't mess around with people's ability to print and not expect a few of the machines not to have problems. I've rarely seen group policy be 100% effective on all machines.Sure, he should expect some problems, but I'm guessing the OP will fix those hopefully few issues. So I wouldn't expect there to be any time on that end for the vendor.
This boils down to how many printers you have. If you have 1-3 printers, clearly you don't have a very widely dispersed group of users, they are most likely distributed to no more than three locations. But if you have 10 printers, this could change things drastically.
@thecreativeone91 is right, GPOs distribute by OU by default. Again depending on your GPOs WMI filtering may or may not be the easiest solution for you (I use it for a few of my printer deployments and it works really well).
So before we can give you any real expectations, you need to give us more information. How many printers, how many departments, how many users, how dispersed are they, etc?
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@Dashrender said:
Sure, he should expect some problems, but I'm guessing the OP will fix those hopefully few issues. So I wouldn't expect there to be any time on that end for the vendor.
The OP asked what his expectations should be for vendor pricing, as he wanted the vendor to do "everything"
So I gave him a range of what it "should be" without knowing the skill or quality of the vendor, he has already said he does not want to touch the printers.
@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't want to do this project myself as I hate printers. So I've asked my vendor to do it.
How long do you think a job like this should take, roughly? The figure in my head is different to my vendors and I was wondering who is being unrealistic
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Huh? You can do this without any down time.
What do you do when the group polices don't apply correctly to some of the devices? You need to reboot or force a GP update on them.
You can't mess around with people's ability to print and not expect a few of the machines not to have problems. I've rarely seen group policy be 100% effective on all machines.Oddly, printer deployment is the one thing that I have never had issues with when using AD. Out of 200 machines here and ~1000 machines at my last job I've never had a system refuse to map printers from a print server over GP.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@Dashrender said:
Sure, he should expect some problems, but I'm guessing the OP will fix those hopefully few issues. So I wouldn't expect there to be any time on that end for the vendor.
The OP asked what his expectations should be for vendor pricing, as he wanted the vendor to do "everything"
So I gave him a range of what it "should be" without knowing the skill or quality of the vendor, he has already said he does not want to touch the printers.
@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't want to do this project myself as I hate printers. So I've asked my vendor to do it.
How long do you think a job like this should take, roughly? The figure in my head is different to my vendors and I was wondering who is being unrealistic
You have me there.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Huh? You can do this without any down time.
What do you do when the group polices don't apply correctly to some of the devices? You need to reboot or force a GP update on them.
You can't mess around with people's ability to print and not expect a few of the machines not to have problems. I've rarely seen group policy be 100% effective on all machines.If they don't apply they will still have the old ones. It's rare to have issues with these sort of policies.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
If they don't apply they will still have the old ones. It's rare to have issues with these sort of policies.
But are you willing to guarantee that the vendor will definitely do this with no disruption or downtime? Ultimately it's the OP who might have to have an awkward conversation with his boss if people can't print for an hour.
It's far better to assume the worst then assume the best.
http://community.spiceworks.com/search?query=Group Policy Printer IssueAnd this is by no means a "rare" issue. Even the most benign of settings can go wrong.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
If you have your OUs setup by location and department (as the norm) you should just be deploy the printers in GPOs within that OU.
Cool. But don't I apply the AD group to the OU?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
If you have your OUs setup by location and department (as the norm) you should just be deploy the printers in GPOs within that OU.
Cool. But don't I apply the AD group to the OU?
No, How would you do that? Users, groups and computers can be in an OU. The OU is just a folder really.
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@Dashrender said:
So before we can give you any real expectations, you need to give us more information. How many printers, how many departments, how many users, how dispersed are they, etc?
I did mention in the OP that there are 15 printers and 50 users. I would say most users access 3 different printers eg a B&W laser, a colour laser, an A3 inket.
Probably three or four of those 15 printers are personal printers, where only one user prints to it.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Dashrender said:
So before we can give you any real expectations, you need to give us more information. How many printers, how many departments, how many users, how dispersed are they, etc?
I did mention in the OP that there are 15 printers and 50 users. I would say most users access 3 different printers eg a B&W laser, a colour laser, an A3 inket.
Probably three or four of those 15 printers are personal printers, where only one user prints to it.
Why do you have so many printers for so few users?
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@Breffni-Potter said:
But are you willing to guarantee that the vendor will definitely do this with no disruption or downtime? Ultimately it's the OP who might have to have an awkward conversation with his boss if people can't print for an hour.
Downtime is ok. We have downtime from time to time under normal operations when printers break, so people are fairly used to it. They normally just print to a different printer and complain that they have to walk a little further to collect the print-outs. I just tell them the exercise is good for them
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Why do you have so many printers for so few users?
Partly lazy users who don't like to walk further than a few feet.
Then we have (I think)
3 dot matrix OKI for printing out multi-part stationary from our ERP system (yeah, I know)
3 MFP lasers which replaced the photocopiers
1 plotter
1 A3 laser for engineering drawings
1 A3 inkjet for engineering drawings
1 high end print for producing our brochures and technical literature
plus a handful of personal printers because directors insist of having their own printers in their offices. -
@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't want to do this project myself as I hate printers. So I've asked my vendor to do it.
Bring in @thanksajdotcom he's the go to printer guy.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
If you have your OUs setup by location and department (as the norm) you should just be deploy the printers in GPOs within that OU.
Cool. But don't I apply the AD group to the OU?
No, How would you do that? Users, groups and computers can be in an OU. The OU is just a folder really.
I'm probably showing my ignorance here. Can I just create a GPO called "Accounts Printers" and then add the "Accounts" AD security group under security filtering? Or is that a dumbass way of proceeding?
