Add printer to all profiles – Server 2008 Terminal Server

Profiles under terminal services can be really messy and problematic. Over the years, IT administrators have come up with various workarounds for profile issues under Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services.

Server 2008, unfortunately brings a few new challenges. I recently ran into one of these when I was asked to add a printer under a user’s profile to which I had no access.  Naturally, I just assumed that the old trick of making a shared network printer appear local would work. It doesn’t.

Server 2008’s add printer dialogue is very different from Server 2003 and many of the options that were available in 2003 are notably absent in 2008. Hmm….so how should I deal with this.

I could just add it to the login script, but this user only wants this printer to appear in this profile on the terminal server…so that’s not going to work. I thought about the issue for a while and then I remembered an old shell command that I had once used under XP to add a printer to all profiles at one. 

So, I fired up the command prompt, put in the command and much to my delight it worked.

Here it is…..

Rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /ga /c\\localcomputername /n\\servername\printername

The solution is wonderfully simple and can be executed with very little effort – this is exactly what Slick IT should be.