My notes from the CMCep Theme 8 session on Software Update Management (SUM).
Session from January 26th, hosted by Jason Githens. Jason is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft and will also be presenting at the upcoming MMS 2011 event.
Configuration
- Superseded Update support
- Persist SCCM 2007 behavior and automatically expire superseded updates
- Or Configure SCCM 2012 not to automatically expire them
- Supersedence expiration setting can go up to 99 months (3 is common at most customers)
- RBA
- Specific roles and scopes for Software Update Management
- Agent Settings
- Client agent settings per collection (eg. Workstations vs Servers scenarios)
- Ability to define collections to which software updates do not get applied
- Migration support (SCCM 2007)
- Migrate templates and searches built in SCCM 2007
- Preserve existing Update Lists or Deployments
- Important: SUP configuration for products & classifications must be idential on SCCM 2007 and SCCM 2012
- Deployment
- Update groups
- Terminology changes: update lists are now update groups
- New updates added to an existing update group are automatically deployed
- Groups can be used for compliance only and/or for actual deployment
- Important: 500 items per update group remains limit also in SCCM 2012 (to ensure it is deployable)
- Automated deployments
- Automatic approval of selected updates
- Scheduled or manual run
- Objects created by rules are interactive (enable/disable, add/remove updates, etc …)
- End-User Experience
- New software center UI
- Control: install/schedule updates, usage of non-business hours
Maintenance
- In Console monitoring & alerts
- Console key compliance and deployment views
- Detailed state of all deployments and assets
- Software Update synchronization monitoring
- Alerts generation for key issues
- Reporting
- Extensive out-of-the-box reporting features
- Content Library
- Updates are stored in the content library
- Maintenance tasks to delete expired updates and content
- Troubleshooting
- Key logfiles (similar to SCCM 2007): Wsyncmgr.log, objreplmgr.log
- New in 2012: RuleEngine.log, for tracking actions related to auto deployment rules
And some additional items from the Q&A session afterwards:
- Update groups
- Q: will there be a feature to support populating deployment groups based on external sources (xls, csv …)
A: no this will not be available - Q: will the Office Reporting components be required to view statistical information
A: no, this is built-in in the SCCM 2012 console