Looking for easy to follow guide for building a software updates process.

Question

I am hoping that I can get some general guidance here. I have responsibility for sccm 2012 in our environment. I also have to do exchange 2010, all Cisco networking and a few other large platforms. Needless to say it gets to difficult to get on a task and
stay focused for long periods of time. I tend to just sort of keep things running and that's all I usually have time for. 
We have sccm 2012 and it's mostly used for OSD right now. I have been tasked with developing and implementing a process for critical updates across the organization. We have one primary site and three secondaries with about 2500 machines. There is no history
of doing updates here other than a previous person who used to do them via WSUS and GPO. But that has not happened for well over a year now.  My problem is that I have no familiarity with doing updates via WSUS or sccm. So it's all pretty new to me. I
got Kent Agerlunds book and like his detailed approach and was hoping to just sort of adopt that process and tailor it to this environment. 
I do have WSUS installed in our primary location and the SUP point on our primary and secondary servers. Things seem to be syncing fine. Now I need to try to put together a process that is easy to manage and works.   The biggest problem I find is that
given I have primary ownership for a wide range of technologies in a company that is not a small mom and pop organization, it is difficult to sit down and get the necessary time to hammer this out. Everytime I sit down to work on this I feel I have to try
to learn it all over again. For some reason, probably my lack of experience with even WSUS or patching in general, they way this is supposed to work is just not sinking in effectively. 
Can someone recommend a decent guide that is easy to understand and easy to follow? I find so much material out there on this topic that it gets a bit overwhelming and I spend what time I do have available jumping from document to document and not really
getting a decent foundation of how this is supposed to work. 
Also, if anyone cares to chime in how they would maybe approach this task if assigned to them. Imagine and environment that has no software updates in place and basically never did. Machines are very, very outdated. I have disabled automatic updates via
a GPO ( this was recommended in the Agerlund book). 
Also, since this is basically a ground zero environment should I have two focuses? One, just getting everything up to date, and then a second process for keeping things up to date?
I realize this is a really broad info dump that I'm asking for, but I find just googling and trying to figure this out ends up with a scattered bunch of links that I don't really feel help me just get started on the right track.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi,
You just need to deploy software updates to specific collections periodically, such as Automatic deployment rules, keep things up to date. Then monitor the status to make sure deployments are successful.
The following KBs describe how to plan software updates.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg712696.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh692394.aspx
Best Regards,
Joyce
We
are trying to better understand customer views on social support experience, so your participation in this
interview project would be greatly appreciated if you have time.
Thanks for helping make community forums a great place.