Question

Offset calendar - Calculating patches using patch Tuesday as reference


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Could you request a feature to allow the calendar to have an option to calculate patch schedule using patch Tuesday as reference?


9 replies

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Hey @Afonso_Alves_31 I am more than happy to get this request in for you!

Is this in progress?  It would be a very useful feature!

Giving this a bump.  This would be a huge win to have

Adding my vote to this as well

Bump as well!

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Thank you all for the suggestion and bumps! 
Forgive me if I’m missing the point, for me I set my schedules to this (pic), in order to align with Patch tuesday.  Every Month + 2nd week + Tuesdays at 10am PDT. 
 

You’ll notice Automox gets it right by understanding you’re looking for the second tuesday of the month (Sep 12), not just the 2nd week and whatever tuesday that is (Sep 5th). 

If I’m misunderstanding, I’ll take another guess, would “X days after patch tuesday” be a setting ya’ll are looking for?
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Would it make sense if there was a deadline capability? Where the patch is “deployed” on Patch Tuesday, but your admins/users could defer updates up to the deadline set 3 days after?  

Let me give you an example of what the issue is.  The schedule is setup in a way to assume every month is the same and every patch Tuesday is the same when that patch Tuesday could come in the 2nd or 3rd week depending on when the 1st of the month falls.  

Production environment- Servers- Scheduled Maintenance is 2nd Weekend of month for Pilot- 3rd Weekend is for remaining servers.

Take the month of July.  the 2nd weekend was July 8.  Patches had not been released by July 8.  So Production (Customers) had to be notified that maintenance window had to be moved since July 1 was on a Saturday. 

 

I think your proposal of X days after released is a good start but being able to provide the granularity of exact dates and times that updates can be applied is critical as sometimes other events are in the way and if there was a way to click on the calendar to say Nothing take place on these days would be helpful.

 

 

 

BTW this was a suggestion 2 years ago   Never saw anything happen.

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Just to post an update - I’m talking with our UI & UX team to see about how we can implement this. 

Our big push lately around policy improvement has been to update the end-user experience on the computer being managed, notifications, scheduling+deadline.

This is an important improvement since it allows IT to better coordinate with the business and manage maintenance windows easier. 

I’ll follow back up with what our teams take is. 
Thank you again for the bumps! 

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