In a recent blog post by Farzana Rahman, Microsoft’s group program manager of the Windows Update group, she wrote that Microsoft has no plans to support third party patching now or in the future. She writes:

Lastly but not the least, I want to address the feedback from users who would like WU to update their 3rd-party applications. People clearly find the experience with multiple updaters on the system less than optimal (and we agree!) Each application updater gives you a different experience, you have to remember to go visit each updater to install updates, you never know when or how updaters will run and what they might do, and so on. People would like one updater for the entire system.

This comes as no surprise to those of us at Shavilk, now part of VMware, who have offered just such a service since the 1990′s. Our flagship product VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus (formerly NetChk Protect), delivers a one-stop-shop for all third party applications (and some legacy Microsoft applications, too). All of the complexity that Farzana describes in her post is addressed in a simple easy-to-use interface for organizations of all sizes to keep their networks secure and up to date.

In fact, we offer Security Advisor, a free service that performs a thorough scan of your network and delivers a report on all of the applications installed on machines (whether physical or virtual) on your network. Most companies we talk to are surprised by the number of titles, versions and publishers installed on machines across their networks. What’s worse is that critical updates to these applications are missing, opening the network–and therefore the business–to unnecessary risk.

So, vCenter Protect Essentials Plus is the “one updater for the entire system.” Problem solved.

- Mike Bleakmore