System Center Configuration Manager 2012 came out over three years ago now, but I want to demonstrate one of my favorite features introduced in that release: Automatic Deployment Rules (ADR). In case you’re not familiar, managing software updates manually through SCCM can be a full time job at a lot of organizations. Approving updates every month, creating the Update Groups, Deployment Packages, and Deployments for each collection that you’re targeting for patching (each month) is a lot of work. Enter the ADR.
One of the biggest complaints prior to version 2012 of Configuration Manager was that it didn’t have the ability to automatically approve and deploy updates like WSUS can. While SCCM and WSUS (standalone) still don’t play nice together, SCCM can now automatically approve updates using ADRs, giving you the best of both worlds. More and more, I recommend this solution to organizations because they simply don’t have the resources to manually deploy updates every month.
In this video, I review how to set up ADRs and their prerequisites to automate the patching of your SCCM clients.