c016smith

Can you make it easier for Lync 2013 / Skype for Business server administrators to keep their servers patched and updated?

Right now you have to download 10-15 MSIs and know what services are running, and determine what order to run those patches. Can you create an updater system that scans the topology and just does CU's and brings servers up to the latest patch level automatically? Even if it was just per-server, not the whole topology (I understand a lot of people have complex and hybrid infrastructures, or don't want to update all services simultaneously). Even when doing a major rev change it would be great to run setup.exe and it identifies all the Lync/Skype services you're running on that server, and it will then download and install the appropriate latest patches, including roll-back protection like most of your other software update/in-place-upgrade solutions currently provide.

Here's a basic process Microsoft provides for applying a CU - something that should be just that, a cumulative update. Run, click next,next,next and should be done - maybe reboot, depends. Carry on with your evening activities. :) But as you can see from the contained diagram... not so simple.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/dodeitte/archive/2013/02/27/how-to-apply-lync-server-2013-cumulative-updates.aspx

Or incorporate that into the WSUS or similar tool for automatic updates? You have started doing this for other products, even including the projected method for the new Windows 10 release through Window Update, and it's a great Idea. It would be very welcome on keeping SPs update to date and especially the new rolling CU's for Lync 2013/Skype for Business, so we can stay up to date with much less effort.

It is appreciated that Microsoft is providing more routine and rapid updates and patches these days. Keep up that great work! It's nice to have bugs fixed within a couple months rather than waiting a year for a massive SP or major release.

Thanks!

Thanks for the update, it's been a long time coming and we appreciate the much-improved UI. Why did you choose to deploy the new UI as a default first-launch, but then revert back to Lync UI if the system administrator had not already ran the powershell code to specify what UI they wanted for the end users?

Seems like it would have been good to either automatically use the Skype UI for everyone, or by default have it assume Lync 2013 UI. But you kind of did something in the middle, which for passive administrators of Lync means the UI will be extremely confusing to users that first time they run after yesterday's update to Skype for business - if their Lync administrators didn't already manually run a powershell script on their servers.

Thanks again