Some items of note involving patching of MS products in the future:
  • MBSA 2.0 will be out Q2 of 04
  • Software Update Services 2.0 is also supposed to be out Q2 of 04
  • MSI 3.0 will include the capability of doing 'delta patches' where the files being replaced aren't actually replaced, but modified in-place. This will reduce the size of patches by quite a bit. MSI 3.0 will also make patch removal more robust
  • The new MBSA and SUS will include some very nice new features
    • Ability to better target patches at different classes of users. Currently with SUS if you want to distribute different patches to different classes of machines you need an SUS server for each grouping. Not so with SUS 2.0
    • A more robust scanning engine to reduce both false positives, and improve detection of patched systems
    • Much better reporting out of SUS
  • Work on reducing the number of reboots is ongoing. Win2003 sp1 will be the best place for this, as support for hot-patching is more possible on that platform