WSUS 3.0 at RC, but still missing some highly-demanded features...
WSUS 3.0 hit RC a couple of weeks ago, and this release is going to be leaps and bounds improved over previous versions. We eliminate the slow web interface in place of a new MMC-based one that uses the Microsoft Reporting Engine.
Microsoft says they have talked with enterprise customers to find out their needs, and it appears that many of them will appear in the finished product. WSUS will be the patching engine for everything in the future. That's the plan at least. ITMU, SUIT, and all the other MS-built patching engines will be going away come the release of SCCM 2007, replaced by WSUS's engine. Not a moment too soon in my opinion. WSUS kicks the pants off of ITMU and SUIT.
There are two major features, though, that didn't make the cut in WSUS 3.0 RC that I'll bet you wish did...
Those two features are:
1. The ability to send a "you patch yourself now" command to clients via the GUI. This was highly demanded by administrators in WSUS 2.0, and could be done via some crafty VBScript scripting. But, it still hasn't made it into the GUI.
2. The ability to pull up a parent/child relationship between superseded patches. WSUS 2.0 could show by the patch what it was superseded by and what it superseded. But, still in this product is no single-report or tree hierarchy that shows patch supersedence. This means that admins still have to create off-line patch "cheat sheets" to keep themselves informed about patch supersedence.
Other than those two gripes through, WSUS 3.0 is going to go far with improving the patching process. The server is a lot more scaleable than the last version, scaling to many more thousands of clients (the exact number is still under review). And you can finally add clients into more than one target group, though that process may still be a little kludgy since inventory-based client groups aren't an option.
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