Another task that is a general nuisance for IT folks is the mundane creation of all the printers that your users need to access from their work computers. In a business environment, it is common to make use of a print server of some kind so that you don't have to make individualized TCP/IP connections between all computers and all printers, but even if your printers are all configured to work with a centralized print server, you still need to create connections to those shared printers on each workstation. Group Policy to the rescue again! There is an easy way to identify a printer connection inside a Preference package, and automate the rollout of that printer connection to your users and computers. This is another one of those settings that you can define at the computer or user level:

• Computer Configuration | Preferences | Control Panel Settings | Printers
• User Configuration | Preferences | Control Panel Settings | Printers

At this point, you're starting to get the hang of configuring new preferences. Once again, all you have to do is right-click on the Printers folder, and choose to create a new printer. When creating your printer inside Computer Configuration, you get to choose between TCP/IP Printer and Local Printer. Utilizing User Configuration settings gives you these two, plus one additional option: Shared Printer. This kind of printer selection is only available from within User Configuration settings because access to a shared printer requires user permissions to pass before the printer can be created.

Whichever printer type you are setting up, choose the appropriate option and simply input the configuration settings for the printer. Here is a sample configuration of a Shared Printer:

While this is another straightforward and fairly simple option to implement, it can be a big timesaver. Imagine your accounting department needs access to print to a copier for general-purpose documents, a laser printer for better-quality items, plus a special MICR printer when they need to cut checks. Perhaps you have a dozen employees in accounting, and they all need access to each of these printers. Doing this by hand would mean you are setting up 36 printer connections by hand – that could take you most of the morning! With Group Policy, you could input the three printer connections once into a GPO, apply that GPO to your Accounting Computers OU, and go out for breakfast with all the time that you saved.