Creating Faxination Printer for Windows

Posted on July 29, 2012 Updated on July 30, 2012

Faxination is product that is commonly used for performing electronic faxing.  I recently needed to create an automated/unattended installation of the Faxination “printer” such that user can print a document to that “printer” which converts the file to an image an composes an Outlook email for sending the fax. Unfortunately the product does not have an installer for this printer creation in Windows, so I had to develop a custom solution.

High-level overview

1. Registers PrnAdmin.dll (which enables scripting printer operations in Windows)
2. Creates a new Windows printer port
3. Copies into Program Files the Faxination drivers and a script which registers the printer for the user.
4. Uses the built-in Windows PrnDrv commands to add the driver
5. Creates a Run key for ever user who logs into Windows to execute the aforementioned user script, which uses the built-in Windows PrnMngr commands to add the printer for the user (and also retains the prior default printer)

To set this up in a package

1. Obtain the latest Faxination drivers from Fenestrae support
2. Obtain PrnAdmin.dll from the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools
3. Obtain Setup_x86.vbs from SkyDrive http://sdrv.ms/O9Odds
4. Obtain CreateFaxinationPrinter.vbs from SkyDrive http://sdrv.ms/NCetyx
5. For the package source files, in the root folder, add “Setup_x86.vbs” and PrnAdmin.dll
   
6. Create a subfolder named “x86” and add the Faxination driver files and the “CreateFaxinationPrinter.vbs” script
   
7. Create the package and advertise to computers to test!