I'm after a bit of advice with regards to a pretty much 'company specific' issue!
My WSUS (3.0) is on Server 2003. The updates are approved and then installed at shutdown, however if staff leave the machines on overnight the updates would install at 01:00 which is controlled via GPO.
Due to issues in the past (mainly to do with the Office File Validation update some 18 months ago) as a company we chose to create a 'pilot test users' group, so these people get the updates first, then 1 of out "sites" get the updates a week later, then the rest of the company get them the following week (so we have a 10 day patching policy)
We are going through a project of updating everyone from Office 2003 to Office 2010, however due to some compatibility issues we need to keep Word 2003 and Excel 2003. Everything was going ok, until the recent batch of updates from Microsoft! Once these were installed the default version of Excel and Word that opens is 2003. I ran some tests and can confirm it is relating to the order in which these updates are installed. I.E. if I installed the 2010 update first, then the 2003 update the default program is 2003. If I install the 2003 update followed by the 2010 update, the default program is 2010!
I did think of declining the Office 2003 updates, as eventually this software will be removed, however I have been told the older versions still need to be patched.
What I am after is finding the best way I can keep both the 2003 & 2010 updates, have them approved, but force WSUS/the updates to install in a specific order. I have thought about staggering the updates, so the Office 2003 updates get approved first, then a few days later the Office 2010 updates are approved, but I can't think of any easy way of doing this and minimising the risk of these updates being installed in the 'wrong' order. I also think staggering the updates is going to be a mamouth task, as the 2010 updates could only be approved for the users who have installed the Office 2003 updates already!
Does anyone know when updates are released for both versions of say Excel, which order the WSUS distributes these in, i.e. is there anyway of forcing the 2003 update to install prior to the 2010 update?
As I say this could be very company specific but if anyone has any other ideas on what I could do to get round this issue I would be glad of any advice! Many thanks in advance!
Jeff