Microsoft Updates and Windows Server Updates Services

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System Center Essentials is built on top of Windows Server Updates Services (WSUS) technologies.  This allows Essentials to take advantage of the standardized Microsoft software updates technologies, content on Microsoft Update (MU), and deliver additional value by building on top of the WSUS platform.

However, it also means that System Center Essentials is sometimes affected by issues that affect WSUS and MU.  Over the last few weeks, two issues have been discovered that do affect Essentials.  Please read through the linked articles on this page to understand the issues and if you're affected.

Some Computer do not receive updates from the WSUS server

If you've deployed Office 2003 SP1 using Essentials, you may encounter this problem.

Consider the following situation. You use Microsoft Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) 3.0 to deploy software updates and hotfixes to computers that are in your organization. However, some computers do not receive updates from the WSUS server. This problem occurs if the computers have Microsoft Office 2003 or components of Office 2003 installed.

KB 954960 has been released to address this issue and the WSUS team blogged about it here: https://blogs.technet.com/wsus/archive/2008/07/10/a-fix-for-client-server-synchronization-issues.aspx.

Millions of drivers, drivers for me...Millions of drivers, drivers for free..

If you've configured Essentials to synchronize driver content, you may not have noticed that many thousands of Realtek drivers were synchronized over the last week. Please see this article on the WSUS for the details https://blogs.technet.com/wsus/archive/2008/07/17/so-many-drivers.aspx. Bottom line - the drivers are targetted at the right hardware, this is causing many, many instances of the driver to be distributed, and we're working on a long-term fix.

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