Gray Knowlton has taken to his Microsoft Office blog today to explain some of the reasons behind September's painful updates and promise that things have been adjusted internally to better ensure more quality releases.
In the post, Gray acknowledges that September's woes were partly due to internal timing issues. There were changes that had to be made to the updates just prior to release and the changes themselves actually caused a worse situation.
Here's what the Microsoft Office team has implemented in an effort to fix the horrors of Patch Tuesday:
- Implemented a normal timing and cadence for updates, helping to minimize last minute changes.
- Improved communication. Microsoft will step up communication through blogs posts and social media to help alert customers to evolving issues.
- Better early warning guidance filtered through the Customer Support teams.
- Developing better capabilities for MSI patching for enterprise updates.
Read the full post: A comment about September and October 2013 Patch Tuesday
Of note, though, the last full paragraph of the post relates to something we've been hearing all along. Since Microsoft has instituted a Cloud-first focus for development, it makes sense that their Click-to-Run technology actually works better now than the MSI methods. This is another in a long line of "if you were running Cloud versions, you'd have no problem." But, it also highlights a problem that will continue to fester and grow over time, as Microsoft silently attempts to push on-premise services and applications to the Cloud.
As always, if you experience any issues with this month's patches, let me know.
