Manually publish a printer in Active Directory

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

To manually publish a printer in Active Directory

Open Active Directory Users and Computers.
In Name, right-click the container object folder in which you want to publish the printer.
Point to New, and then click Printer.
Type the UNC name of the printer that you want to publish in the directory.

Notes

To open Active Directory Users and Computers, click Start, click Control Panel, double-click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Active Directory Users and Computers.
To perform this procedure, you must be a member of the Print Operators group, Domain Admins group, or the Enterprise Admins group in Active Directory, or you must have been delegated the appropriate authority. As a security best practice, consider using Run as to perform this procedure. For more information, see Default local groups, Default groups, and Using Run as.
Group Policy settings for printers determine whether printers published with a print server running Windows NT 4.0 or an earlier operating system should be pruned if the print server becomes unavailable.
You can also use the Pubprn.vbs script, provided in the System32 folder, to publish printers with print servers running Windows NT 4.0 or an older operating system.
The printer you want to publish must be shared.
You must have directory service administration rights to publish printers.
You must have the Manage Printers permission for the printer you want to share or to publish.
You can create printer names that contain spaces, special characters, and more than eight characters. However, some clients do not recognize or correctly handle such names. The entire qualified name of a shared printer (for example, \\PRINTER2\PSCRIPT) must contain 32 or fewer characters.