IT Guy / IT Gal series – WSUS to simplify patching complexity
- Do you work in a small IT shop or are you the only IT resource that your company has?
- Are you the "go to" guy/gal for anything to do with technology?
- Do you (or others) consider yourself a "jack of all trades"?
- Do you work in a small company with less than 250 PCs?
- do you spend most of your day reactively fixing and addressing issues that come up and feel like you can't proactively plan to get ahead?
If you answered yes to any of these questions this blog post and series is for you.
This is the first post in a series of blog articles aimed at sharing solutions to issues facing IT Professionals working in this type of environment. We’re taking articles from YOU on how you’ve overcome issues in the past with innovative solutions to get the job done. Maybe it’s using Microsoft technology – maybe it is not – what matters is that it addresses a problem, allowing you to get on with your day.
Let me introduce you to Stephen Switzer, a recent graduate of the Algonquin College 2 year Computer Systems Technician program. It combines labs, lecture and classroom time with co-op terms in all sizes of businesses.
When I reached out to the blog readers as well as some of my contacts from over the years looking for people to share their solutions in this series – Stephen’s post made it’s way to my inbox. I thought it was bang on the money for a solution that addresses one of the issues A LOT of IT professionals are faced with – and it’s FREE TO BOOT!
Stephen is not a blog writer of many words in this post, but he gets right down to the point. You have to have a method of routinely patching systems and applications across your organization, regardless of size. Have a read to hear what he’s talking about.
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p.s: Are YOU up for the challenge of contributing your thoughts, ideas and solutions to “The IT Guy / IT Gal” series? Contact me directly or use the email link at the top of the blog with draft stories AND/OR suggested topics. Let's ramp up the noise and start giving back!!!
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I had an experience during one of my co-op terms.
Shortly before being sent out on our first co-op placements we had a guest speaker come in and talk to us about his day to day work and some of the software that he uses. One of those pieces of software was windows SUS server. He explained briefly how it worked and went on talking about other things and taking questions.
Fast forward to my placement. I am working in a large hotel as the only other IT person. One of the problems that has been nagging them is a single update to windows that breaks one of their programs. As a result the IT manager had disabled automatic updates on all the computer and would regularly go around and update each PC manually then remove the offending update so that the software would work correctly
Seeing how this was terribly inefficient and how it quickly became MY job to do these updates I remembered back to the guest speaker's talk about the SUS server.
After a bit of research and a quick proposal to my manager I had a server up and running and the computer updating from the SUS server for all updates except the one that was causing problems.
Now I had a much higher level of security and as an added bonus this system used a significantly smaller amount of Internet bandwidth by having to only download each update once for the network instead of once per computer. But best of all I didn't have to spend hours and hours updating computer.
After moving on from that position have have installed SUS then WSUS several times at different positions helping to speed updating and save on resources.
Stephen Switzer
Service Engineer
Nova Networks
personal blog - www.quantis.ca
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You can get more information on Windows Software Update Services and what it can do for you from this link on our TechNet Site. It includes all documentation, system requirements, deployment guides and details on how to setup WSUS in a distributed environment.
A step by step guide for deployment can be found here.