In my testing of these products, I did not have any problems with damage or corruption of the OS. If there is concern with this possibility, you can install either of these products on a non-production machine with access to the network where the target machines will be located. There is no agent or other software that is installed to the target machines, so this should not be a concern either. At Windows 2000 Magazine, we try to give all vendors with products that match our criteria a chance to be in the review. I am not aware of any other products in the service pack management category. - Joshua Orrison

Joshua Orrison 4/19/2001 10:24:55 AM

Hi, regarding this article "Service Pack Management" as well as the related "Ahead of the Service Pack", I'm looking at the possibility of using either of the SP management software (SP Manager or SPQuery) to inventory/administer/track Service Packs on the enterprise I'm supporting. However, I'm expecting resistance by folks and management who may not be familiar with the products or are reluctant to load any "foreign" agents, services, or software on the target computers (in this case NT 4.0 servers). Can you tell me if there are any risks to damaging/corrupting the OS by using any of these utilities. I'm unclear as to whether separate software needs to be loaded on the target servers (I haven't read through all the vendor info yet on the web-site). And if so, what does the software consist of (i.e. a separate service?) The more I know about this, the more I can be prepared to justify it's use on our NT enterprise. Any info would be appeciated. Also, can you tell me if there are any other tools of this type (Service Pack Management) that I should be looking at to compare? These are the only 2 I've heard recommended. Thanks,



BIG AL4/2/2001 4:14:50 PM

Of course, in a Win2k Active Directory environment, the easiest way to install the W2000 SP1 is via a group policy installer package assigned to the PC's. This will log deployment, check for previous installs and remove / install again if required for any domain or OU you choose.

James Deverall 3/16/2001 1:58:51 PM