ThinPrint – How To

Introduction

On domain controllers (alias Active Directory servers) with a central store the Group Policy Administrative Tem­plates (.admx and .adml files) installed by the ThinPrint installer don’t work. That’s why they must be moved to the central store.

The ThinPrint Engine 11 GPO installer places admx and adml files to %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions whereby the corresponding adml files are in subdirectories (en-US, de-DE, es-ES, fr-FR). If you need to get everything on a central store you will need to move the admx files as well as the subdirectories containing adml files.

Caution! To avoid overwriting existing files: If one of the subdirectories \en-US, \de-DE, \es-ES or \fr-FR already exists on the Central Store, you must not copy the subdirectories themselves, but only their contents.

Moving ADMX and ADML files to the central store

To include all ThinPrint GPOs you need to move the following files and subdi­rectories from the local directory %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions to the central store:

• ThinPrint.admx
• ThinPrint_AutoConnect.admx
• ThinPrint_Client.admx
• ThinPrint_Engine.admx
• \de-DE
• \en-US
• \es-ES
• \fr-FR

Differences between group policies version 10.x and 11

With version 10.x the tables Map Additional Printers and Dynamic Printer Matrix were stored in the group policy (GPO) registry in the same type of registry value as in the local AutoConnect configuration. This has changed with version 11 due to the new configuration database TPACGlobal.db.
The main difference is, that the new GPO will not store the Map Additional Printers and Dynamic Printer Matrix tables anymore. Instead it will only store (and apply to the servers) the path to the TPACGlobal.db. It is crucial to copy a working TPACGlobal.db to a network share before the new GPO can apply Map Additional Printers or Dynamic Printer Matrix configuration to any server (see Storage destination for AutoConnect settings).

Further notes

• The GPOs themselves will never notice any changes in the tpacglobal.db data­base. The file tpacglobal.db is located on a network share which in most cases will not be the domain controller. Changes to the table Map Additional Printers or Dynamic Printer Matrix will work even if the domain controller is down – as long as the network share is not down.
• Only the path to the file tpacglobal.db is configured using the GPO (you can see it grayed out on the terminal servers if the GPO is active).
• The Map Additional Printers and Dynamic Printer Matrix tables can be edited in the GPO dialogue, but technically there is no difference to using one of the terminal servers, as in any case the changes will be written directly to the one and only database file located on the network share.
• The database file tpacglobal.db is not pushed to the terminal servers, virtual desktops or workstations, it actually is read by AutoConnect directly from the network share and then pulled whenever needed.

FAQs

On this, please see: FAQ: ThinPrint Group Policies