Suggestion for Feature - Ability for Offline Patch Deployments with Notification and User options.
I'm proposing to have locally cached deployment option. We have users that take their laptops home every day and even for weekend. Having ability to cache patches for installation on their machine while they are not building and give them option to when to apply them. Here is a quick scenario how that would work.
- User is scheduled to get patches on Monday Morning between 12am a - 10am. They take laptop home on friday and don't come back into office until 9am which only leaves 1 hour of deployment window which is small..
- Scan and Download task has extra option to -cache updates locally- and downloads them to users PC while they are on network.
- Auto-Deployment task has option -Notify of Cached Updates- and another option -days ahead notification- which would let me specify how many days ahead of the deployment schedule to show notification about cached updates that are available. I would chose "2 days" so the Monday deployment schedule would prompt users on Saturday for installation if they wanted. 3rd option would be -repeat interval for notification- which would have Every Reboot / Every # of Hours / Once a day @ this hour and would prompt user in my example on every reboot until the Monday Deployment
With these features we can patch road-warriors and people who constantly miss deployment cycles or get annoyed by not having control when they can get their laptops patched up.