Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
This section covers the following topics:
■
Configuration Manager software update point
Software update client settings
■
Managing updates
■
Monitoring and troubleshooting software updates
■
Automatic deployment rules
■
Configuration Manager integrates with the WSUS engine to synchronize with the Microsoft
Update servers to retrieve metadata for software updates, assess which software updates are
required for Configuration Manager clients, and then deploy those updates to clients. You get
the following benefits by using Configuration Manager to manage software updates instead
of using WSUS by itself:
Scan and deploy functionality
You can scan a collection of client computers for
required updates, analyze results, and then deploy updates to those client computers.
■
Compliance integration
You can integrate the software updates feature with other
Configuration Manager functionality, such as compliance baselines and task sequences,
for operating system deployment.
■
Collection-based maintenance windows
Use this feature to ensure that
Configuration Manager only applies updates during approved maintenance periods.
■
Enhanced monitoring and reporting
Compared to WSUS, Configuration Manager
provides extensive monitoring capabilities, such as detailed state messages, status
updates, and alerts for key software-update issues. Configuration Manager also pro-
vides an extensive number of reports to show your entire organization's deployment
status and compliance statistics with respect to updates.
■
Wake on LAN and power management support
Configuration Manager includes
support for technology that wakes up a computer on a local area network (Wake On
LAN technology). This feature enables you to deploy software updates after business
hours without requiring users to leave their computers on, which consumes power
unnecessarily.
■
Support for Network Access Protection (NAP)
With the integration of NAP and
the System Health Validator point site system role, you can define what software
updates are required for computers to connect to and communicate with the network
resources. This differs from WSUS integration with NAP, by which, rather than requiring
specific updates to be deployed, you test to see whether an update check was per-
formed recently and detected updates of a specific type have been installed.
■
