Questions on Software Updates

Question

4 years with ConfigMgr and I'm still trying to get a grasp on Software Updates... After reading a number of articles related to 2012 and ADR I've come up with a few questions I'm hoping I can get answered.
For clarification - I just recently converted my Software Update Groups / Packages from a product-focused method to a year-to-year method. So rather than "All Windows 7 Updates" I now have "All Windows Updates 2014". I have high hopes
for this configuration and many others seem to have good success with it. However, because I'm dumping a years worth of updates for multiple products into a single "2014" package the packages are reaching sizes I'm not entirely comfortable with.
2013 is ~18 GB and 2014 is already ~22 GB. I have offices all around the globe that I need to support and this is where my questions come in:
1. By default I always check the following option for my deployments. It seems like a no-brainer to have this option enabled:
Up until now I've been struggling to get these 15-20 GB software update packages across some pretty slow WAN links. After dealing with multiple failures and re-distributes I'm curious if I can leverage the Microsoft Updates option 100% for some of these
distant locations. I suppose the only downside is 10-30 client computers downloading updates at the same time, but the trade off doesn't look so bad. Any thoughts on this?
2. Is anyone limiting their download packages to yearly + required-only? I'm pretty much downloading gigabytes of updates that aren't required by any of my active systems, and its rare to non-existent for us to have a largely outdated system joined to
our domain. I'm considering going this route to reduce the size of my update packages but I wanted to get feedback.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I have WindowsXP (well until this month), Win7/8/8.1, Office 2007/2010/2013.
In both 32bit and 64bit flavours.
I do monthly patching cycles (security patches plus non-security patches).
I have quarterly deployment packages - one package for each Windows edition, per architecture. The Office patches are bundled in with each Windows platform, because we offer specific Office versions with specific Windows platforms, in my organisation.
I'm not using ADRs at the moment, but now that XP is gone, I will be automating a lot more.
I have a few saved searches that I reuse each month (e.g. released or revised in last 2 months and isnot expired and isnot superseded)
For the combination of Windows and Office that you have, I think yearly DPKGs is stretching it a bit too much.
Although CM12 is a lot better than CM07 at handling SUM, plus the single-instance nature of the content library in CM12, there are limits, and "poorly connected" sites will always give some grief.
Don
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