[BC] Microsoft Word

[Sid Schweiger]

>>Sid,

Can you please elaborate? You got my attention on
this one. Do all 200+ computers in your office have
the same OS? Do they share monitors, keyboards,
etc? Your office must have one LARGE air conditioning
and UPS system! I hope they automatically defrag, at
least :-)<<

The answer is: Windows Server Update Services.  It's a free piece of software from Microsoft which runs on Windows Server 2003 or 2008 and gives you complete control over which Windows updates are pushed to your PCs.  In a large office, and particularly in a company which must comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (one aspect of that compliance being patch management), WSUS is worth its weight in gold and can save clutched IT managers enormous amounts of time.

You set WSUS to sync with Windows Update, say once a day after business hours.  You decide when you set up WSUS:  1) which Microsoft products your WSUS software will download updates for, and 2) how you want them deployed.  You can set WSUS to simply return a list of what's available, so you can test everything ahead of time, or you can set it to approve certain categories of updates without intervention (the auditors like to see Critical Updates and Security Updates approved automatically).  The WSUS interface is web-based, so you can log into it from any workstation as long as you have the correct user name and password for the server.  The MS product list is pretty long, everything from Server 2008 to the Zune MP3 player and its Windows interface.

By running a registry script on each machine (you can run it once when you set up the machines, or you can plant it in your network's login script) you redirect the Automatic Updates applet to look at your WSUS server rather than the Windows Update web site for its updates (once you do this, all the options in Automatic Update are grayed out).  At the workstations, WSUS waits a set amount of time, determined by a setting in the registry script, before installing the updates on the machines and prompting the user to reboot if necessary.  WSUS also keeps track of which workstations it's hooked into and what their update status is (how many updates each needs, how many were installed, how many were missed and for what reason).  It works with any Windows PC that has the Automatic Updates applet (2000 and above).

One thing Microsoft got right.

Sid Schweiger
IT Manager, Entercom New England
20 Guest St / 3d Floor
Brighton MA  02135-2040