Greetings,

We have about 20 workstations in our office running Windows XP Professional. We're also running one Dell PowerEdge server as a file server running Windows 2003 Server standard edition. We're on a workgroup configuration.

We'd like to be able to deploy Windows Updates to each computer automatically, either at each workstation or over the network.

It's become too much of a hassle to sit down at each computer and download and install the updates, and it's taking too much time. Our users are too illiterate to understand how to download and install the updates.

We've tried the automatic updates feature in windows, but our users are still being prompted to install the updates after they're downloaded.

For security reasons, we'd like our system to be up-to-date with Windows Updates on a daily basis but this can not be accomplished manually. Any suggestions?

There is an option in both w2k & xp to check WU daily at a time of your choosing. If you have already config'd this & are still getting a prompt then you have a local security policy/config that interferes with auto-installs - which is often a good thing & intentional. Locate your current security requirement to verify all installs & it may offer a way to continue allow MS installs only so that you can continue requiring user-confirmation on non-MS installs.

In Win2k/sp4:
Start > Settings > Control Panel > Automatic Updates

In Windows XP/sp1:
Start > Settings > Control Panel > System > Automatic Updates

G'luck! - jonathan

See also

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/windowsupdate/sus/susdeployment.asp

if you wish to setup your own internal WU server. This allows you to sellect what patches fet applied when &/or test+modify patches before you apply them to your machines.

If your network relies on 1 physical server, I'd be careful about turning on WU. Some updates have been known to crash computers. All updates should be tested prior to adoption.

case in point, DirectX9. only video cards that were manufactured after March 2003 support it and it has caused a lot of strange video features on the display.

many server software platforms have a software management system built in. MS Server 2003 has a "Centralized desktop application deployment". to do exactly what you want. Of course, upon implementation you'd need to patch the software for new things like MSBlaster.