Group Policies with wildcards

Question

We have a few group policies in place in our school setting that deploy printers to OUs named after classrooms.

For example, in room 400, we might have a policy that pushes out a printer for the print server in the room that's named 400-PS, to machines named 400-01, 400-02, etc.

Currently, there needs to be a policy created for each room, that's then linked and enforced in the OU for all logins that occur in room 400.

There seems to be a simpler way to go about it, though. If I were to create the printer shares using a standard naming convention "\\400-PS\EPSON" or "\\400-PS\HP" then I could just have one or two policies... one for an epson printer, and one for an HP printer, and then just push those one or two policies out depending on what was in said classroom.

BUT!

This would require the policy to be "aware" of the OU it's placed in. Can we do something using wildcards where the printer deployment policy deploys a printer to "\\%OU%-PS\EPSON" or something? I've looked and didn't see any functionality along those lines.

Answer 1

If you have updated the schema to 2003 r2 you can do this easily. Using the GPO preferences are you can use the targeting tab on each printer and do this with ease.

If you don't have r2 the only way I can think of doing this is to create computer groups and add your computers you want for each room into that group and then use filtering to apply those policies only to those computers. This only works if the settings are computer based, so if they are user based you need to look in to doing this same thing and the using loop-back features. If you have to use loop-back make sure you really understand it, this is a rather confusing policy for newcomers to it and doesn't react as you would first expect sometimes.