Saturday, July 17, 2010

WSUS Updates: "Important" Drivers

The WSUS Team blog posted an announcement regarding a new category to be added within the Drivers category which will be called "Important".  I'm glad they did this and it will be a huge benefit to anyone using WSUS to update drivers.  Until now, it's been a vast sea of murkiness.  This should help bring the meaningful ones to the front and help admins out greatly.  They also reminded us how you can import your own drivers into WSUS if needed.  Nice to be reminded of that. Below is a copy of the original blog post…

WSUS Admins –

We would like to notify you of a change you will see starting next week.  If your WSUS settings are configured to synchronize the “Drivers” update classification then your server will start syncing drivers designated as “Important.”

Important drivers are ones known to address a critical issue. Typically they fix a reliability issue that impacts use of the device or stability of Windows. Important drivers are subject to additional scrutiny and testing, relative to drivers offered optionally through WU to unmanaged clients. For more information, refer to the Windows Logo Program criteria for Important driver updates.

In the past, we heard feedback from the WSUS community that too many drivers for variants of similar hardware were crowding the admin consoles, because the drivers appeared identical in the admin console.  Because of this feedback, we temporarily stopped targeting drivers to WSUS servers. We developed a solution to consolidate drivers that are applicable to multiple Plug and Play (PNP) IDs into a single driver update for you to manage and distribute. This drastically reduces the number of driver updates that need to be published, while ensuring you are receiving the latest driver updates that are proven to fix known issues. Even with this improvement, you will still see multiple driver updates for the same changes in some scenarios, but this should be less burdensome than before.

As a reminder, you can import any driver update to your WSUS server using the “Import updates…” action in your admin console.  http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/site/faq.aspx

- WSUS team

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