I'm interested in installing HP and Dell updates on my fleet of computers. I suspect we would only require a small subset of the available updates. Is there a way I can determine which updates are required by my clients without downloading and publishing every update in their catalogs?
I imagine we could acheive this by publishing the meta data only. Is there a way to publish meta data only in bulk or, better still, automatically?
There is no way to determine if any given update is going to be needed by any given system except by either allowing the Windows Update Agent to scan the update after publication to the WSUS server, or directly investigating the criteria for the update to be applicable. For each update in the Software Publishing node tree, you can view the configured rulesets in the console. The Update Titles are usually descriptive enough to identify the probability that an update might be needed.
You can publish updates as metadata only, which is an efficient way to get information on which updates are actually needed. You can also publish updates in bulk; however, to publish a collection of updates as metadata only would require setting the content type value on each row of the package list in the Publishing Wizard.
Is there any way to script the publishing wizard?
No.
