This week

Jul 19, 2010 08:13 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft will start serving drivers designated as Important through the automated update mechanism designed for business users. Customers currently leveraging Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), will be able to easily integrate Important drivers into their environments through the solution. According to the Redmond company, businesses will start seeing the change starting with this week. In order to have their servers start syncing drivers designated as “Important,” customers need only to configure their WSUS settings to synchronize the “Drivers” update classification, the software giant emphasized.

“Important drivers are ones known to address a critical issue. Typically they fix a reliability issue that impacts use of the device or stability of Windows. Important drivers are subject to additional scrutiny and testing, relative to drivers offered optionally through WU to unmanaged clients,” a WSUS team representative stated.

The change was catalyzed by feedback from existing business users running WSUS. Microsoft has in fact decided to stop targeting driver to WSUS servers altogether after customers complained that the updates were saturating their admin consoles. Contributing to the confusion and customer frustration was also the fact that it was impossible to tell different drivers for variants of similar hardware apart, seeing how all the refreshes appeared to be identical in the admin console. However, the Redmond company is now confident that that the issues reported by business users have now been fixed.

“We developed a solution to consolidate drivers that are applicable to multiple Plug and Play (PNP) IDs into a single driver update for you to manage and distribute. This drastically reduces the number of driver updates that need to be published, while ensuring you are receiving the latest driver updates that are proven to fix known issues. Even with this improvement, you will still see multiple driver updates for the same changes in some scenarios, but this should be less burdensome than before. As a reminder, you can import any driver update to your WSUS server using the “Import updates…” action in your admin console,” the WSUS team representative added.

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