Were pleased to announce that the upcoming release of PME v2.6 is being made available today the 19th of April 2022. This release will also include an update to the third-party patch engine.

This release is a significant milestone in our ongoing commitment to ensuring we offer the best patching system in the RMM market.

New patches from band c + out-of-band channels

For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of patching bands please see the following link: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/windows-quality-updates-primer/ba-p/2569385

Out-of-band updates have caused quite a storm in the last year with Microsoft on at least 2 occasions releasing them for major issues, leaving almost everyone in the IT space scrambling to fix devices via scripting or manual tasks.

Below is an example of one of their OOB patches from January showing that it is available as a manual task only, the first option being the traditional “check for updates” button at the device level:

We are delighted to announce after consulting with Microsoft we can offer this in an automated way. If/when Microsoft releases another OOB patch your normal patch detection scans should discover them and significantly lower the workload to resolve these issues when they happen.

Note: Whilst we offer this capability, we still require Microsoft to make the patch available which on occasions they roll out gradually over a period of 24-48 hours.

There’s More:


The below improvements have also been added:

• Increased timeout of 3rd party patch downloads from 10 to 20 mins
• Added OS architectural scanning to allow support for Microsoft Edge within Third Party Patch
• Improved logic to support discovery of both Windows 10 updates and offer Windows 11 upgrades without reliance on manual change of registry keys.
  
  New Engine Versions