Replaced all of our network printers a couple days ago and am having trouble pushing new drivers to workstations. Windows Server 2008 R2 printer management and mostly Win7 workstations.
Previous to the new printers, all a user (student or teacher) had to do was log on to the domain and the "right" printers were available to them. No drivers were ever installed or pushed locally - everything was straight from the print server.
There were five printers deployed through four GPOs (structured for printer location.) Three of the printer GPOs are user (student) configurations; the fourth is both user and computer (faculty) configuration.
Everything worked perfectly.
All five of those printers were replaced. Since the device and port names were/are dependent upon their location and purpose, each new printer has the same static IP, host and port name as before, but is a brand new machine and driver.
In the print server, I removed the old devices, added the new ones, installed drivers, deployed, test-printed, checked the GPOs and did a gpudate.
My workstations are not seeing the new printer drivers. They see the printer names they're supposed to see (same name as before) but the dialog belongs to the old device. I can browse the web admin for every printer by name or IP fine, it's just the drivers that are an issue.
I've searched and founds lots of how-to sites for deploying printers with GPOs but they all call for settings in GPO computer and user configurations that didn't exist in our past. In other words, it wasn't broken before, so it seems to me all I need to do is force a driver change, not reinvent the GPO wheel?
Simply updating the GPO doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Was my mistake in retaining the same names for the printers and ports?