Patch Management

@Mike_Tills

I think you should keep a goal of reducing the number of information sources in your environment. You should have a primary or definitive knowledge location. It doesn’t matter what that solution is, but keeping that number low or integrated into each other so one becomes that primary source is worth considering.

If the RMM becomes that, make sure you do the leg work so you are not double entering data. Simple-Help arguably can track alot of information on it’s own if you do the leg work to make integration possible but I also use another system to track data like that.

Roy

You can do this by adding a registry entry or a GPO to disable windows updates. Or put in a fake wsus server address. Then in your abc script, before you run it. Turn off the registry entry and restart update services.

You can find the GPO or registry entry by googling it online. I can look through my scripts if you cant find it through google.

OK, I think SimpleHelp is great!

But we are moving more into ‘security’ and keeping systems up to date as we have clients that need cyber essentials. I really need to manage the whole windows update process along with 3rd part applications.

Ideally I need to see a list of the updates in one windows that have been performed on each machine and updates needed as well as if the machine needs a reboot. I also need to cover 3rd party applications.

I have been using chocolatey for this, but again there seems no easy way to compare installed versions and new ones released.

It seems from what I have found is to look for a new RMM, but just want to check in case i am missing something??

This is a tricky one. SimpleHelp doesn’t do patch management. They focus more on remote access.

For patch management make sure when looking, look at exactly what 3rd party programs they support. Not everything is usually covered, so make sure they cover the apps you want to check/update. I have heard that https://www.tanium.com/ does well at patch management, windows, and third party, but I have not personally used them.
I also like PDQ inventory and deploy https://www.pdq.com/, but it is based more per site than if you have a bunch of clients from different locations. Let us know what you choose.

If you want to stick purely with simple help for an all-in-one solution, it will take a bit of work scripting things out through Powershell.