AndrewMorgan.ie

A little irk of mine with Windows 7 and server 2008 R2 was the Devices and Printers interface. This mix of peripherals is fine for standard desktops, but in SBC / VDI the devices list generally contained items you didn’t want users seeing, or ejecting for that matter!

Not happy with the Irk, and still on my app developing buzz, i decided to write SBC Printers:

SBC-Printers is a simple little .net 4 application, leveraging WMI for printer enumeration and control.Because SBC Printers is an executable, it can published as a XenApp application. Sbc Printers can also be installed as the default printers interface on the start menu:

So really your users won’t know the difference or care for that matter!

SBC-Printers also comes with securable options for adding or deleting local printers:

The display of add or delete can be controlled via the settings file in the installation directory:

Installation:

1. Download the following MSI
2. Install the MSI to the default directory.

To restrict the standard printers dialog from users, but leaving it accessible to administrators:

• Browse to c:\program files (x86)\SBC-Printers\bin

• run the powershell script below, make sure to run it as an administrator!

That’s it, once the Powershell script runs. it removes the users access to the registry classes giving them access to the standard devices and printers interface. Which means we’re now ready to provision SBC-Printers to replace it.

Provisioning the replacement to the user:

Now just import the userkey.reg into the users profile on login, you can do this via your user profile manager of choice, or use Group Policy preferences.

That’s it!

As you can see I haven’t streamlined the install process too much, this is mostly down to the simplicity of the tool. If you like SBC-Printers but would like a better installer, just drop me a comment below.

Roll back:

if you need to restore the standard interface, uninstall SBC-Printers then add the (local computer\users) group back to the following registry keys ACL:

•  HKCR\software\classes\CLSID\{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A}
• HKCR\software\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A}