Printer Map GPO Based on Department

04-14-2025

By: Nicolas Foster

My organization has a bunch of network printers. The techs have to add printer for clients when they get assigned a computer. This can easily be forgotten and often was. I wanted to automate this and so I asked my manager if I could do this project.

This automation was going to be done with Group Policy. Every client is added to a departmental security group which allows them to access files on a network share. For this project, the most important aspect of the security groups, is that they are based on the department and every client is added to their respected group. I would only need to find out what printers were serving which departmental security group.

Log-into the Domain

Open Group Policy Management

Add a New GPO to Group Policy Objects:

Name it:

Edit it:

Navigate to the printer section within Group Policy Management Editor:

Select New > Shared Printer:

Input the share path (I didn’t set this printer to default, as this could potentially become a hindrance for some clients because the GPO being applied could wipe out client configurations):

Move to the common tab and select item-level targeting:

Select the security group:

Now that the GPO is created, I link it to our users group:

Select the GPO:

Its now linked:

Test it by removing printers on a user account who has the applied GPO and run gpupdate /force. Printers should be automatically added.

I repeated this process until all the departments had a printer GPO. Most departments had multiple printers:

This project greatly reduce the work for other techs within my organization. It was also important to me because it helped the entire organization.

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