Client Management Suite

Hi there

In the Patch Management Solution for Windows 7.1 SP1 User Guide on page 13 i read:

You can configure part or all of Patch Management Solution for Windows to automatically download and install future software updates.

Anyway i read through the whole thing and configured and staged and created policies and patched and made my clients compliant and i didnt find any information/settings about this "automatic install" of future updates. I still have to create the policies manually when not compliant (woot - staging is done automatically).

Am i missing a settings, or is the feature missing in the product?

No, you're not missing anything.  This release streamlines the policy creation process by enabling users to initiate the policy creation process by creating policies for patch packages that have not already been downloaded from vendor sites, rather than requiring them to download the vendor packages and then go back into the console to create the policy after the packages have been downloaded.

This release does not contain functionality that automatically downloads and distributes software update packages based on pre-defined criteria, such as the relevant applications, operating systems and update severity levels.  That is something that may be beneficial to small or medium sized organizations or in distributing updates to a test environment as part of a phased rollout, but is not something that would likely be used by large enterprise organizations to distribute updates to their production environment.

I agree with all you say. Anyway the default target could be the test environment, not the production environment.

That still does not explain the quote from the user guide. It slipped in there from a future release, or i have a too big imagination about that automation?

Yes, the default target could certainly be a test environment.

The language in the documentation should probably be clarified to eliminate any confusion.

There is no such functionality in the product, nor is such functionality available elsewhere.  Product roadmap information is always subject to change. 

While the Connect site is a great place to discuss product enhancement requests, it is not an appropriate forum to discuss product roadmap information or release plans.

Edit – Removed legacy information, to avoid confusion, that isn’t relevant to the SP1 release. No workflow component in the SP1 release.

Thanks for the clarification.