Publishing a group of patches as metadata-only without having to change from Full --> Metadata one at a time

casey.robertson

I'm just revisiting Patch Manager after a short absence and had a request to check Dell driver levels.  So I have the Dell catalog and filtered on "wifi" or "wireless".  Now I want to publish them.  By default it wants to download the content and then publish which is normally fine.  However in this case there are 700+ patches that meet this criteria.  When I go to the Publish wizard I can select individual updates one at a time to change it from Full content to Meta-data only.  But I'd rather not do this for 700+ patches one at a time.  I can't seem to multi-select and modify.  What am I missing or is this not possible?  I think in SCUP you can choose meta-data only during the publish wizard and I will go that route if I have to but I really wanted to do my 3rd party stuff inside of Patch Manager if possible.

Thanks,

Casey Robertson

LGarvin

Greetings Casey!

In the UI there is no ability to multi-select and change the Content column. (Admittedly not an optimal situation.)

You can, however, FILTER the Publishing Wizard dialog to show only the packages you have selected (which may help) -- at least makes the list contiguous.

Now, another part of this is the =700= packages to be published. In all probability only a handful of those 700 packages will actually be applicable to your systems. Driver packages are matched by HardwareID (and Dell packages, specifically, are matched through WMI queries), so if you can determine the installed Hardware IDs in your systems, you can use that to pre-select the packages that need to be published and likely eliminate a significant number of those packages that will never be relevant.

We are definitely interested in your feedback and suggestions on how the dialog can be improved to meet this particular use-case.