[geeks] Windows XP, and activation

[Chad McAuley]

On 11/6/06, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> >From: Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
> >Date: 2006/11/06 Mon AM 12:25:52 CST
> >To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
> >Subject: Re: [geeks] Windows XP, and activation
>
>
> Microsoft also has tools to allow an organization to bypass MS update
> servers and have desktops/servers update from a privately maintained
> repository which can, as I understand it, download updates as they are
> released and only with operator intervention will those updates be pushed
> out to the desktops/servers...
>
> They really sort of do have the functionality, but not for the individual
> desktop user.
>

Yep, that's pretty much exactly what WSUS (which we use here at $work)
does.  Every day at a scheduled time it checks with Windows Update (or
Microsoft Update or whatever the hell it's called now).  Then you can set
how (and if) updates are approved.  You can automatically approve for
installation or just detection, and for either case you can filter by update
type(s) and/or computer group(s).  It's not quite as granular as some would
like, because for "approve for detection" and "approve for installation"
you can only set one combination of update type and computer group filters.
So you can't have things like "Group A gets these update types B and C
installed automatically and type D only get detected while group W gets type
X automatically installed and types Y and Z don't even get approved for
detection, etc", but at least it does give you some control over it.
Anything that isn't automatically approved you can go in and manually
approve; here for each individual update you can say detect for group 1,
install for group 2, do not install for group 3, etc.