Not all network printers showing up in scan

I ran into this problem the other day after adding yet another MFC device to our network. I added the printer to our 2008 r2 print server and added both x86 and 64bit drivers. But when I tried to add the new printer to the workstations that would be using it, it never showed up when scanning for printers. I double and tripled check settings on the server, made sure I had checked to box for “list in the directory”, but even after waiting several minutes it never showed up. I then found this forum post detailing a group policy setting that if left not configured limits the network printer scan to 20 twenty printers. After making the the changes all our printers are now visible when scanning for printers. So if you find yourself in the same boat you can click the link above to read all the posts concerning it or just do this from the group policy editor:

Go to Computer config
Admin templates
Printers
Add Printer Wizard – Network scan page (Managed Network)

Enable this and setup the types of printers you want to display. If you are like me and just need to show more network printers change Directory Printers to 0 (zero) for unlimited or to whatever limit you like.

Scanned files not showing up in shared folder

We have several copiers at our office that are used for scanning documents to .pdf files, among other things. Last week we added yet another one and I configured the copier to scan the files to a department shared folder just like I’ve done many times before. When testing the new setup I would see the new scanned files in the folder from my machine, but the users in the department that it was set up for only saw an empty folder. Several minutes went by and finally one user could see the file, but the other four or so still could not. So after doing some digging I found several forum posts and Microsoft articles on the subject and a registry hack that did the trick for me. You can find the article from Microsoft here. To sum up the fix, here is what is required. Change the DWORD value for the following registry keys to 0 (zero).

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Lanmanworkstation\
Parameters\FileInfoCacheLifetime

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Lanmanworkstation\
Parameters\FileNotFoundCacheLifetime

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Lanmanworkstation\
Parameters\DirectoryCacheLifetime

And thats all there is to it.