I was recently decommissioning an old file and print server and one of the final tasks on our list was moving printers from one to another. It’s been a while since I’ve done this using vanilla print management, but happy to know there is now an import/export wizard for Printers. Since the source is 2019 and we’re going to 2022, It’s a straightforward process of exporting Printers and Drivers you select during the export wizard to a file, copying this single file to your new print server and then doing the reverse by importing the file.
Once the printers are active on the new server, I run a test to make sure they work. I also do a Google on the drivers to see whether there are any Type-4 user mode drivers, so that we can look to harden the print environment.
Once we’re ready, it’s time to adjust the Group Policy Object, Scripts or whatever method you use to deploy printers. For this customer, we have a GPO that deploys printers, so editing the policy, we set each printer object to Update and then place in the new UNC path for the printer. We have clients who do this via PowerShell scripts as well as InTune using Universal Print (which is great, but why do I need ANOTHER license Microsoft…)
We do this to a test batch of machines and update using gpupdate /force in the command line. Once we see that these machines are working as expected and getting their new printers, we then plan on deploying the GPO to the rest of the fleet.
Leave a Reply