I am currently researching what product to go with when it comes to a patch management system. It is important for both Microsoft and Third party patches to be a part of that system.We have about 200 windows workstations and about 40 servers. I know there is a limitatation with SCE as it maxes out on 30 servers.I'd like some feedback from customers of SCE and their experience. It is hard to find aVAR that specializes or has experiencein System Center Essentials. I can't seem to get any good references for SCE. Many VARs have partnerships with Alitirs, Lumensions, etc...So far my research has taken me to demo Shavlik and SCE.I like the feature set of System Center Essentials, I just need some good feedback.Thanks,Ed

Hi Ed -I really enjoy using Essentials to manage the updating of the workstations on a network. SCE is perfectly sizedto manage your 200 workstations and up to 31 of your 40 servers (including the SCE server itself). As for rolling out Microsoft updates smoothly to your workstations, SCE is almost the perfect tool.You get excellent insight into the updating status of each computer and you can individually and collectively approve updates and report on update status. I like that SCE uses WSUS for all updating functions, because it's important that Automatic Updates is working on your Windows computers anyway.As for 3rd party, SCE has quite some features for packaging software updates, as well as the ability to download partner catalogs of updates (of which there are quite a few!).Since you can download and install an Evaluation edition of SCE 2007 SP1, you can try out SCE's ability to push your third-party updates without risk before you buy.I would say-- if you can validate that the critical 3rd party updates that you want can either be pushed out with SCE's Software module, or downloaded by partner catalog--you will be happy with the solution.Good luck,John JoynerMVP-OM, MCSE, MCTS:OM

You might want to consider EminentWare's WSUS Extension Pack. They just released anew version that extends the power of WSUS to deploy and manage 3rd party updates and applications (as well as Microsoft.) www.eminentware.com