I had the pleasure of attempting to migrate a print server this weekend. I mean I had to figure out a quick and efficient way to install the 70 some odd printers on a new server. I was not going to be doing this manually that was for shit sure! I had some junior admins standing by -
just in case!
I quickly found out that Microsoft provide a tool to back up and restore your printers. Score!
It said it will back up all your printers, settings, and drivers into a .cab archive, and then it allows you to restore the cab file on a different machine.
This small app grabbed ALL my printers including the local ones, copied all their drivers and crap to a single cab file. I was able to run the PrintMig on the new server and import the printers.
In 15 minutes or so all my printers were installed and working properly except one USB guy that needed to have its port switched. All in all it went very well. And I discovered another thing while testing:
It says it is intended for server migrations, but it work fine for workstations too.
So you can copy printers from one machine to another, create cab files for different off domain laptop configurations. Or this is great if you don't do the Active Directory thing and want to semi-automate printer installation.
The latest version of Printmig is 3.1 and is available for downaload here.
more details available from:
http://www.microsoft.com/printserver
A special thanks goes out to the internet on this one. Thanks for being there for me man!
_TheOfficeSpaceAdmiN_
