I am rebuilding group policy at a site which currently only has a single office but is expanding to multiple offices over the next couple years. When they do expand to the additional sites, the majority of the work force will become mobile between the sites, and almost entirely on laptops.

I had intended on deploying printers using group policy preferences and item level targeting based on site and group membership so that when users move from site to site they get printers in the office they are physically located in. I just realized that policy is the only way to deploy printers from the print management console. I had hoped to stick with using print management console since it is such a consolidated and clean interface to look at, but doesn't look like that will be an option.

when you install new drivers on a print server, the clients will get updated as well. I am not sure if the mechanics of this is related to the print server or group policy. If I deploy a printer with preferences, would it update the drivers on the clients? My instinct is that it would not, but am not sure on that.

Also, does anyone see a problem with managing printers out of the print management console? It typically drove me nuts when anyone deployed a printer outside of it, but it was more because once someone starts deploying a printer a different way, it seems that another half dozen deployment methods are pretty much immediately implemented and then becomes hard to manage. I think from a management perspective if I standardized on using group policy preferences management would be acceptable - have never considered not using print management before to deploy printers though so am not sure what to think about it.

domain controllers are 2012 R2 and print server at least during the group policy overhaul is 2008 R2, to be upgraded to 2016 some time early next year. All workstations and laptops are windows 7 and newer