Capture Printer Data Quickly

Server upgrades, migrations, and increasingly consolidations comprise one of the most important classes of jobs a network administrator performs. The success of such projects relies on the administrator's ability to correctly and efficiently gather all the necessary information about an existing server's configuration so that a transition to a new server occurs with minimal disruption. If you're adept at keeping documentation, the job should be a breeze. But if you either keep poor documentation or have inherited servers that have undocumented configurations, you're in for some investigative work. To prepare for a server-migration project for one of my clients, I had to document the printers installed on the client's Windows 2000 Server print servers. We wanted to create a simple way to capture the printer information so that we could later recreate it on the new Windows Server 2003 server.

Printer-Migration Methods
The Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit's Printer Migrator utility (printmig.exe) is a great tool for easily migrating printers from one server to another. It has a simple GUI from which you can recreate printers, and it even automatically loads drivers for you. . . .