How to create scripts to install printers on WinXP

Our company just ran into this issue. We are undergoing a transition of employees from one section of the building to another section of the building. One of the challenges that we faced is getting the printers installed on the employees new locations. We used a combination of Altiris Software Delivery Solution and the Software Portal to publish printer install tasks to the end users to install the printers at their location. I know some of you are probably saying, login scripts to do this, searching AD for printers, AD Group Policy, etc… Unfortunatly, we did not have the time an resources from our internal staff that manages AD and login scripts to accomplish this. Plus our end users can’t browse AD for printers. We decided to use an employee self help portal web page using the Altiris Software Portal and publish printers based on Department locations and the printers in the area. The printer tasks in the software portal were all setup to to contain a package for each department location with no source files, and multiple programs for the package using a command line that references the Printer User Interface. An example of how we did this on the command line is shown here:

%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /n \\myprinterserver\myprintshare .

If you want to see the options for using this tool you can open a CMD Prompt and type in the following to see the help options for using this tool.

%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /?

My company uses the Altiris Software Portal with the printers available as shown below.