I will probably need to refer to this myself, but maybe someone else will find this useful.

Still working through some print queue management tasks, I needed to change permissions on a collection of printers. Yesterday, I broke down and did a bunch of repetitive work in the GUI, and noticed there were some inconsistencies in the permissions applied to a clients print queues. Today, I decided that I would fix them, but I didn’t want to use the GUI.

Although the Server 2012 Printer Management Set-Printer cmdlet can change the permissions through its -PermissionSDDL parameter, I haven’t found a workable (even if you call SDDL workable) way to do so on a Server 2008 system.

So I fell back to using PowerShell with Helge Klein’s SetACL command-line tool. I could also have used his COM version if I wanted to be really efficient. I use an array of arguments to the external command. See this Scripting Guy post for more info on calling external commands.

Here’s what I did:

# Retrieve a list of target printers
PS C:> $rlprinters = gwmi Win32_Printer -filter "Name like 'RL -%' OR Name like 'RL-%' "

# Construct a list of printer names in \\[hostname]\[sharename] format
PS C:> $printers = $rlprinters | % { '\\' + $_.SystemName + '\' + $_.ShareName }

# Create some variables to make the command construction simpler
PS C:> $setacl = 'C:\local\bin\SetACL.exe'
PS C:> $group = 'DOMAIN\RL-PrinterGroup'

# Iterate through the list of printers, calling SetACL for each
PS C:> foreach ( $p in $printers ) {
>> & $setacl '-on', $p , '-ot', 'prn', '-actn', 'ace','-ace',"n:$group;p:full"
}

It worked like a champ.

Note that I needed to run an elevated PowerShell session (run as Administrator) to be able to make the changes. Also, I tested this on a single printer before attempting to make bulk changes. I also have a nightly dump of my printer configuration. You get the idea.

You can include multiple actions for each invocation of SetACL, and there are a number of ways to collect output in case you need to follow-up on problems when applying changes to large collections of printers. Hopefully, this is enough to get you started,