Virtually Jason

One of my customers is using UEM and wants to set up a default printer per user group, but only set that default printer if the user hasn't already got one configured.  Setting up a default printer as a User Environment policy is trivial, but the conditions to preserve existing settings were interesting. We determined that, if the current default printer contains either the words "Microsoft" or "Webex", then we'd consider it to be unset and would correct it, otherwise we'd leave it alone.  Of course, we also need to detect that the computer is in the correct room group, too, so what's that logic look like?  I wrote it out in PowerShell style pseudo-code like this: If ((DefaultPrinter -match "Microsoft" -or DefaultPrinter -match "WebEx") -and ComputerGroup -eq "RoomA"){Set Default Printer}. My first challenge came from the fact that, while UEM Conditions do offer logical AND and OR, they do not offer parenthesis.  Wh...

One of my customers has been trying to figure out how they are going to deal with printer assignment in their View environment.  In truly stateless desktops (without Persona Management, even), you have to completely depend on external printer assignments, either through a logon script or through Active Directory.  I prototyped both solutions for this customer.  In order to minimize our logon times, we preinstalled our printer drivers in the parent image (for both tests). We found that a normal Windows 7 logon onto a stateless desktop (where it’s always the first logon and so has to create a local profile and apply group policy) takes about 20 seconds from the time the user hits “connect”.  Using Group Policy to distribute printers increased that logon time to about 45 seconds… which was a bit too much for my liking.  Using a logon script, on the other hand, does not delay the logon process (even if the printers are not actually present immediately upon log...

I’ll say it again – I’m not an Active Directory guy. That said, my customer had me out to implement a VDI solution for them and, as we all know, that’s highly dependent on Active Directory (at least, if you’re using Windows desktops). This particular customer didn’t have any printer deployment solution in place; instead they sent out a member of their IT team to configure each user’s printers manually. Needless to say, that printer solution doesn’t scale very well into a Nonpersistent Floating desktop pool scenario, and just as obviously, it fell upon me to guide them to a better solution. This customer is using Windows 2008 R2 print servers and has Windows 2008 Domain Controllers. There’s some pretty cool GPO based printer deployment solutions in this version of windows, so the first solution that I attempted was to just use Active Directory to deploy printers when people log in. I was able to get this working without too much difficulty, but in the Floating environment, it a...