Software Updates Email Template

Question

Hi All
Not sure if this is the correct forum to ask this question, if not feel free to move it.
I'm in the process of using SCCM to take over the deployment of monthly updates to windows servers. As part of this migration i need to send out monthly emails to server owners detailing updates that are due to be deployed for the current month based on
the updates created by an automated deployment rule and date and time for the deployments.
Does anyone have any resources, templates or recommended reading on how to go about generating these monthly emails. I know there is going to be at least some manual entry but im a bit stumped as to where to start so any help is greatly appreciated. Im hoping
to include a list of updates to be deployed and a short description of the update on top of date and times and which servers are to be updates when based on collection membership.
I have also subscribed to microsofts monthly bulletin update emails but it appears that there are more critical and server updates than just the ones contained within the bulletin details such as other hotfixes without a bulletin ID.
Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

I wrote a simple script to do this in our environment:
Function Get-UpdatesSummary {
    [cmdletbinding()]
    Param(
        [parameter(mandatory=$true,ValueFromPipeline=$True)]
        [string[]]$UpdateGroupName
    BEGIN {}
    PROCESS {
        ForEach ($group in $UpdateGroupName){
            $updates = Get-CMSoftwareUpdate -UpdateGroupName $group
            ForEach ($update in $updates){
                $props = @{'ArticleID'=$update.articleID;
                           'BulletinID'=$update.BulletinID;
                           'Date'=$update.dateposted;
                           'Severity'=$update.SeverityName;
                           'DisplayName'=$update.LocalizedDisplayName;
                $obj = New-Object -TypeName psobject -Property $props
                Write-Output $obj
$updates = get-cmsoftwareupdategroup "your ADR groupid here"|get-updatessummary
send-mailmessage -to toaddress -from fromaddress -subject
subject -smtpserver server -attachments ($updates|export-csv c:\temp\ThisMonthsUpdates.csv)