Ever find patching your OCS Servers painful? Relief is on the way...

If you are like me and have all too often wasted precious time working out what patches you need to drop onto your OCS 2007 R2 servers, I have great news for you. Microsoft have just released the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Cumulative Update Installer. This package will determine what packages you need to install, list them out with links to the KBs, download them for you and install them in the correct order. This will save you hours.


So how does one get their hands on this little beauty you ask? Just pop over to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b3b02475-150c-41fa-844a-c10a517040f4 and simply download the ServerUpdateInstaller package.


Once you run the Cumulative Update Installer, you will see a list of the updates that are needed for the particular server you are patching.

After clicking the Install Updates button, the required updates will be automatically downloaded and installed.

As the patches are installed the progress is updated, and a log is created for each update. One thing I love is that once all the patches are installed and you click the Close button, the update packages that were downloaded are automatically cleaned up.


One important note is that you will still need to manually load Group Chat patches and the Database upgrade (OCS2009-DBUpgrade.msi).


If you want to automate things further you also have the option of running the updater with the /silent/forcereboot switch which will install the updates silently and then reboot your server once finished. You can also have the needed updates downloaded for you and placed in a subfolder named Extracted by using the /extractall switch.


So for Matt's 5 cents:
Don't waste your time guessing what updates you need to load on each of your R2 servers, just reach for the Cumulative Update Installer, kick back and watch it do its magic.