Windows Office Updates

[MTRankin]

Good Day,

We are using cached-mode, offline-mode to run Windows updates. We look at the WSUS server as a second opinion let’s say. The WSUS server is showing a lot of Office files that are critical updates, but BatchPatch is not downloading them. This is happening on all machines running office applications, I’d guess about 35 servers. This just started happening in March and we now have the April cab file and still seeing the same thing. Here are two screen shots, the first is what we see on the WSUS server and the second is our Windows settings in BatchPatch. Any guidance you can provide would be appreciated.

I guess I cannot add a screenshot, perhaps a suggestion as to what might cause an Office update marked as Critical to not be downloaded. Thank You.

[doug]

–Offline mode contains only a subset of updates– primarily security updates. Microsoft controls which updates are distributed through each channel. Not every update that is available from Microsoft or through your WSUS server will appear in offline mode scans.

–If you have a local WSUS server, why would you be using offline mode? You should just use your local WSUS server, which gives you full control over which updates are presented to target computers.

–This link explains all of the possible reasons why you might not be seeing updates that you expect to see when scanning for available updates in BatchPatch:

batchpatch-and-the-windows-update-control-panel-report-a-different-number-of-available-updates

[MTRankin]

WSUS does not work well for us. We have 30 or more servers to install in a 3 hour window and we would constantly have issue, the cat root file, software distribution or the servers taking over an hour to apply the patches and reboot. All that has been eliminated with BatchPatch and we are extremely thankful for it. Our only issue is not getting all the updates. If I was to change the setting to no longer Enable ‘offline mode’ would the updates continue to work like they are currently, and would we get all the updates? Forgive if I have confused your response?

Thank You,
Mike

[doug]

You should definitely NOT use offline mode unless the machines actually do not have access to the internet or to a WSUS. If you switch to online mode, you’ll be able to get all of the available updates, but whether or not this is an identical reflection of your WSUS or not will depend on the search settings and the WSUS settings. Generally speaking, I think it will give you what you’re looking for. However, in all cases it doesn’t make a ton of sense to compare your results to your local WSUS if you’re not going to actually use the WSUS to distribute the updates.

Just FYI with regard to WSUS… 30 servers in a 3-hour window is nothing. WSUS can generally handle thousands in a much smaller window. While I don’t know the details of your WSUS setup or what type of issues you are encountering with it, what I *can* tell you is that a properly functioning WSUS server will not have any issues with 30 machines. I can also give you another tip, which is that you can have group policy handle downloading the updates to the computers from the WSUS in advance of the maintenance window so that when maintenance time comes the machines are not having to download updates from the WSUS since they will have already done that. We have some instructions on WSUS GPO setup for pre-downloading updates here: batchpatch-integration-with-wsus-and-group-policy

[MTRankin]

Thank you for your assistance on this. Your help is greatly appreciated.

[Author]

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