We have been using custom end-user notifications with deferral options for quite a while with success. In July, a lot of employees received a notification, but with no deferral option, and their PCs rebooted in the middle of videoconference meetings or other inconvenient times.
Is it possible that earlier deferral options were not seen and so the employees had already exceeded the maximum number of deferrals? How long is the deferral option displayed if it is not acknowledged?
Reboot deferrals
There’s two types of notifications, one for patches and one for reboots. Currently the notification for patches gives deferral options, but the one for reboots doesn’t. It does notify, but just gives you a 15 minute notice to save your work before it reboots. It sounds like your users were getting the patch notifications properly, but then you ran into a patch that required a reboot which would have triggered the second scenario. If you want to avoid reboots, you can make sure all your policies are set to not reboot after patches, and then let people reboot on their own. We do have some worklets that check for pending reboots and prompt the user without forcing the reboot (i.e. they can defer until the next time the policy runs and prompts them):
We are working on adding deferrals to reboots as well, so that work is in progress. In the meantime you can use the workaround above. Does that help?
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