I find the printer management scripts included with Server 2008 bothersome. However, until we get to Server 2012, with its shiny new printer management cmdlets, I’ll keep trying to make do with what we have.
I was pleased to find an old post on the Printing Team’s blog about using the .Net System.Printing namespace with PowerShell to automate things. Some brief experimenting looks promising.
For the moment, in order to switch the printer driver version on about fifteen printers (all the same model), I used PowerShell and WMI, like this:
PS C:\> $printers = Get-WmiObject Win32_Printer -filter "Name like 'RL -%'"
PS C:\> $printers | sort Name | ft Name, DriverName -a
PS C:\> $printers | Where DriverName -eq 'HP Universal Printing PCL 6 (v5.3)' | % {
>> $_.DriverName = 'HP Universal Printing PCL 6 (v5.6.1)'
>> $_.Put()
>> }
This took quite a while to execute, but did work. What I need to do now is modify the permissions on each printQueue. I doubt I can leverage Get-ACL and Set-ACL for this.
