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Hi!
Thanks for the opportunity to get in touch on the Windows Update topic!
I'm currently managing a fleet of 1000+ Dell Notebooks using Microsoft Intune. Our devices are hybrid joined and we're switching from WSUS to Autopatch. At the moment I'm implementing a mix of Autopatch and the Dell Command Update tool that can be controlled by ProActive Remediations to search and scan for driver/firmware/bios updates. TBH it's a huge pain and I'm starting to think if the drivers provided by Windows Update are "good enough". Dell Command Update seems to have newer versions of drivers, firmware and especially bios though. Is this going to change in the future and drivers might get more up-to-date?
Dell seems to be working together closely with Microsoft and we really appreciate Microsoft implementing new features with Dell as a "pioneer". Things like pushing BIOS settings to our devices using a simple Intune config profile and the Dell Command Endpoint Configure for Microsoft Intune tool are a really good step in the right direction. Are there any plans to bring together Windows Update and Dell Command Update even closer in the future? BIOS updates seems to be available on Dell tools way sooner than they are in Windows Update and the updating process itself seems more stable when using the Dell tool. ProActive Remediations can't be used in this scenario because the time of execution is way too random and never as set in the script frequency. Are there any changes coming to Windows Update considerung BIOS updates? Getting them sooner, making the update process more reliable? Maybe even manage bios version "like apps" using Autopatch?
Thanks a lot for your great work, keep it up! 🙂
More details to this question:
Microsoft performs additional verification during the flighting process of drivers before they are recommended through the service. This helps ensure that drivers do not cause issues with devices after taking the update.
A few days after a publisher submits a driver to be published on Windows Update, we make the driver available through the service as an "Other" driver. This allows critical updates to be available through the service as soon as possible and allows admins to deploy these updates with a manual approval. Once flighting completes, the driver is made available as "Recommended" driver and can be automatically approved under an automatic policy.