1.

Click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Active Directory Users and Computers.

2.

Click the Active Directory container of the domain you want to manage (an Organizational Unit or a domain). Right-click that container, and then click Properties.

3.

Click the Group Policy tab, and then click New to create a "New" Group Policy.

4.

In Group Policy Editor, expand the following folders: Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, and Printers.

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Allow Printers to be published to the Directory:
Enables or disables publishing of printers in the directory.

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Automatically publish new printers in the Active Directory:
On by default, this setting can be turned off so that only shared printers specifically selected are placed in the directory.

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Printer Browsing:
If you enable this setting the print subsystem announces shared printers for printer browsing. You should disable this setting if you do not want the print subsystem to add shared printers to the browse list. If this setting is not configured, shared printers are not added to the browse list if a Directory service is available, but are added if a Directory service is unavailable.

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Prune printers that are not automatically republished:
This setting determines whether or not printers can be pruned from the directory. It is usually best to leave this unconfigured, but if you find that printers are being pruned even though the computer they are published from is functioning and on the network, enabling this policy prevents the pruning service from deleting the published printers during network outages or situations in which dial-up links that are only up intermittently are used. To prevent printers from being removed from Active Directory, enable this policy, and retain the default selection of Never in the Prune non-republishing printers list.

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Downlevel printer pruning properties:
Determines how orphaned PrintQueue objects representing downlevel printers are to be pruned. A printer is downlevel if the server hosting the printer is not running Windows 2000.

For example, if a print server is unavailable for an extended period of time, the pruning service may delete the orphaned PrintQueue object. If the print server is running Windows 2000 or later, it publishes the printer again when it comes back online. Downlevel print servers, however, cannot publish printers by default, so pruned PrintQueue objects are not automatically republished by a downlevel print server.

Pruning "Only if Print Server is found" causes the pruning service to delete a PrintQueue object only if it can verify that the printer does not exist on the print server.

Pruning "Whenever printer is not found" allows the pruning service to delete orphaned PrintQueue objects even when the print server is unavailable.

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Directory pruning interval:
The Pruning Interval determines the period of time the pruner sleeps between checks for abandoned PrintQueue objects. The pruner reads the Pruning Interval value every hour.

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Directory pruning retry:
Sets the number of times the PrintQueue pruner attempts to contact the print server before deleting an abandoned PrintQueue object.

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Directory pruning priority:
Sets the thread priority of the pruning thread. The pruning thread runs only on domain controllers and is responsible for deleting stale printers from the directory. Valid values are -2, -1, 0, 1, and 2, corresponding to THREAD_PRIORITY_LOWEST through THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST. The default is 0.

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Check published state:
This policy is used to verify that published printers are published in Active Directory. By default, the published state is not verified.

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Web-based printing:
This policy bit is designed for administrators to disable Internet printing entirely. When this policy bit is selected, none of the shared printers on the server are published to the web, and none of the shared printers are able to accept incoming jobs from other clients using HTTP. The default is not selected.

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Custom Support URL in Printers folder's left pane:
This policy bit is designed for administrators to add customized support URLs for the server. If this bit is not selected, the left pane of the Printers folder displays URLs for selected printer plus a vendor support URL if it is available. If this bit is selected and the customized support URL is provided, the previously mentioned two support URLs are replaced by the customized URL. The default is not selected (that is, no customized support URL).

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Computer Location:
Specifies the default location criteria used when searching for printers.

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Pre-populate printer search location text:
Enables the physical location tracking support feature of Windows 2000 printers.