Whassup with WSUS?
My WSUS feature in this month's Redmond Magazine has caught a lot of attention. Let me say that I just love this tool. The upgrade to v3.0 makes it just that much better in my mind as well. From the article:
After what seemed like an eternity in beta, the long-awaited WSUS 3.0 upgrade finally made it to market in early May. The good news is this full-point upgrade to Microsoft's patch-management system adds a host of new and desirable features that were missing from previous versions. Adding stability and scalability to an already fully functional, no-cost tool further solidifies its place as an enterprise patch-management solution.
So what should you expect in this upgrade? First, Microsoft has completely eliminated the much-maligned Web interface for configuring WSUS and replaced it with a new interface based on Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 3.0. This means that if you haven't upgraded your MMC, you'll soon be upgrading it on your management workstation. You'll also need to download and install Microsoft Report Viewer 2005, because WSUS uses this tool for report generation.
Click on for more...
The biggest benefit of moving to a client-server interface is the improvement in speed. The long delays between clicks waiting for an interface refresh are gone. Including the Report Viewer with the product increases its ability to not only publish reports to the screen, but to also publish Excel and Acrobat PDFs without requiring the full version of Acrobat. If manually creating reports isn't your thing, you can now enable e-mail notification to send a regular status report or a notification when new updates are available on a daily or weekly basis.
Active Directory is still the primary mechanism for deploying client configuration to workstations around the network. The administrative template file hasn't changed at all. It still includes the same 12 configuration options that it was released with back in Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Read the full article over at Redmond Magazine. Definitely check it out 'cause I listed there a snippet of code that will save you hours of time every month. That code instructs a machine to automatically download and install any pending patches immediately. I call it my "big red button".
Get the full piece at:
http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?EditorialsID=1775
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