Believe it or not - some of us Microsoft employees are not at TechEd...  That being said - something was released to the public today during one of the keynotes - WSUS!

I was preparing to create/modify some content in order to present a customized Patch management presentation tomorrow. I almost forgot to check back to the WSUS site to see it go live today. Well, as I checked it a little while ago – it is live, well and ready to download in order to start planning on deployment at your site today!  I have always been an SUS fan - better yet when it's boosted with SMS for deployment. Now comes WSUS - awesome!

I’ll have some good information in the next little while (still busy preparing for tomorrow) about WSUS and how I’ve implemented it at a couple of customer sites of varying sizes. This is just my introduction post in order to get you the information and some links.

My favourite thing about WSUS? The Detect Only state of approvals. If there are Critical security updates that have been downloaded to your WSUS server, you can tell at a glance if they are required in your environment, because they are detected as being required on the client systems.  It doesn’t deploy – only informs you that you need to do some testing as soon as possible in order to move that approval status from Detect Only to Install!

There are lots of really good features that I’ll elaborate some more on later – so for now I will encourage you to start some downloading and research into implementing WSUS into your environment. I’ll even throw in some SMS 2003 integration stuff too! Hang in there – it’s not ALL released yet, just WSUS!

I’ll at least point you to the pre-requisite resources and make note of some things for you.

Main starting page for all things Windows Server Update Services
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/updateservices/default.mspx

The WSUS faq
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/updateservices/evaluation/faqs.mspx

WSUS Technical information page (lots of main links to resources)
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/updateservices/techinfo/default.mspx

WSUS Deployment Guide
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/library/WSUS/WSUSDeploymentGuideTC/ace052df-74e7-4d6a-b5d4-f7911bb06b40.mspx

WSUS Operations Guide
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/library/WSUS/WSUSOperationsGuideTC/29cfa815-991a-4f71-bd44-11c708d0aabc.mspx

WSUS Step by Step for basic installation.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/library/WSUS/WSUSStepbyStepTC/29733254-b3e2-43d6-aaa6-4ba5df50e961.mspx

Best of all - the API with some examples! - Lots of GOODIES
http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/0/4/804ab03b-98ff-4d19-a90f-700eb5222777/Update%20Services%20API%20Samples%20and%20Tools.EXE