Powershell – Collecting installed Printer drivers

Printing on Citrix is a very intresting topic :). There are many things that you should be awair of to make it working flawlessly.
Her I’m going to show a short script that can help you in identifying inconsistent Printer Drivers accross your XenApp environment.

In a nutshell, we have to make sure that the driver version installed on a Print server or on a Client machine [depending on the type of printing redirection you use] is the same as on a XenApp server.

The manual approach requires as to open a Print Managment console on each of the machines and then do a comparison of the Driver Names and Versions:

If yo have many Servers to check, then this task can be quite challenging.
So lets use Powershell to help as:

cls

$Servers = "SERVER1","SERVER2"
$Servers += "SERVER3"

foreach ($Server in $Servers) {
    ''
    $Server

    # Querying WMI
    $PrintDrivers = get-wmiobject -class "Win32_PrinterDriver" -namespace "root\CIMV2" -computername $Server 

    # Collect details for every detected printer
    foreach ($PrinterDriver in $PrintDrivers) { 

        write-host "Name: " $PrinterDriver.Name 

        $Drive = $PrinterDriver.DriverPath.Substring(0,1)

        # Extracting Driver version info:
        $DriverVersion = New-Object PSObject -Property @{Version = (Get-ItemProperty ($PrinterDriver.DriverPath.Replace("$Drive`:","\\$Server\$Drive`$"))).VersionInfo.ProductVersion}

        # Show Driver file version:
        write-host " Version of the Driver: "$DriverVersion.Version

        # For logging
        $PrinterDriver.Name + ',' + $DriverVersion.Version

        # Extracting Driver path:
        write-host " Driver Path: " $PrinterDriver.DriverPath 

        # Few more details:
        write-host "   Data File: " $PrinterDriver.DataFile
        write-host "   Configuration File: " $PrinterDriver.ConfigFile
        write-host
    }
}

As a result we gonna get a list of installed drivers including a version and some other useful details. Here is an example of an output:

Name:  HP Color LaserJet 2800 Series PS,3,Windows NT x86
 Version of the Driver:  6.1.7600.16385
HP Color LaserJet 2800 Series PS,3,Windows NT x86,6.1.7600.16385
 Driver Path:  C:\Windows\system32\spool\DRIVERS\W32X86\3\PSCRIPT5.DLL
   Data File:  C:\Windows\system32\spool\DRIVERS\W32X86\3\HPMCPD25.PPD
   Configuration File:  C:\Windows\system32\spool\DRIVERS\W32X86\3\PS5UI.DLL

“Win32_PrinterDriver” class is used to collect tha data – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394366%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Further, generated reports can be aggregated in a nice Excel file 🙂