Run “Add a printer” wizard with administrative credentials

I have a question from customer about how to add local printer to Windows 7 Enterprise if you have a CD with printer drivers but don’t have a local administrator credentials. Well, it is easy if you have SCCM infrastructure and SCCM client installed on your target computers.

During one of my project we introduced application self-service solution to end users. We just used GPO preferences and placed “Run Advertised Programs” shortcut to user’s desktop and renamed it to “My Installable Applications”. It is pretty neat and most of customer’s SCCM packages were created as an optional (not mandatory) for end users. So end users could install any of available apps from a list of available apps.

Coming back to initial question about local printer I found that it could be done via SCCM package. I put following command line to package and distributed it to end user computers with administrative rights:

rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /il

End users can choose it from a list of available apps. Done deal!