Howdy,

We've been having trouble getting patching to work on our servers for months.  I decided it's time to start over.  I've done some searching and have found tons of different people saying they have the best practices and recommended ways of handling patches but they're all different.

I'm using SCCM 2012 R2 and want to setup ADRs so that every month we can set all our servers up to install their Windows Updates.  I have a few questions:

1. Is there an "Official" tutorial, video, walkthrough of how we should be doing this?
2. Is the best way to test this to set something up that is available ASAP but doesn't expire until far in the future?  Should I then be able to see the patches in Software Center as available but they just won't actually do anything since the expiration would be way down the road?
3. Most of our servers are running 2012 or 2012 r2 and we're just concerned with the standard patches that come out every month.

Thanks for any links, input, advice, etc.

#1: there is not "best way" to achieve that. It depends on the requirements of your company.
#2: expiration has nothing to do with installing updates.
You should define the exact requirements first before going into technica

You can start with this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44578

There are also lots of walk-throughs on the web like those from Gerry Hampson and Niall Brady as well as a couple of excellent books including the Unleashed and Mastering books.

You can start with this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44578

There are also lots of walk-throughs on the web like those from Gerry Hampson and Niall Brady as well as a couple of excellent books including the Unleashed and Mastering

>  I never know if a tutorial I found is a good one or just some random person that recorded what they were doing. 

That's just it... tutorial's are meant to show you how the features work. They are not meant to be "follow these step-by-step in your production environment and you're done" instructions. Gerry and Niall's guides are to walk you through building things out in a lab environment so you can learn them.  You need to learn how the features work, look at the requirements of your company, and then make conscious decisions about how to implement the tool to meet the requirements.

If you don't feel like you'll be able to synthesize that from knowledge learned in tutorials/guides/books, then I'd suggest bringing in a consultant with a deep understanding of the product to help you accomplish it.

I hope that helps,

Also good to read: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg682168.aspx

To get some help, you should get some answers to these questions:

• What compliance state does the company want the software update level to be? When you have a goal, it's easier to achieve that.
• In what timeframe monthly does the compliance need to be done? This helps you setting deadlines for your deployments.
• How does software updates affect on the business? When is the best time to apply updates and reboot things? You  need to address this one to the users / owners of the systems. This helps you setting the maintenance windows for software updates / other updates.
  

Generally software updates isn't a really simple thing to, many things have to be concidered, those are only few of them.

http://www.patchchart.com - chart of released MS updates and the problems that the community has seen on them. It currently lists couple of months back, but you should get the picture.. the updates aren't always 'clean' and might cause some problems so this is one thing you should take seriously when building automated solutions for updates...