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KACE Product Support Question

Patching Office 2016

04/12/2017 2577 views
We use KACE to patch our workstations, and I'm noticing a pattern when applying patches to machines with Office 2016 installed. We install patches silently in the middle of the day, and allow to user to snooze the reboot for up to 12 hours. The user should not even notice anything going on in the background.

This has worked fine for years. Now, with Office 2016 it appears that the Security Updates are forcing Outlook and Skype for Business to close as they get installed. This is unacceptable.

I've narrowed it down to these 3 patches this month:

Security Update for Microsoft Outlook 2016 32-Bit Edition (KB3178664)
Security Update for Microsoft Office 2016 32-Bit Edition (KB3178703)
Security Update for Microsoft Office 2016 32-Bit Edition (KB3178702)

Anyone else seeing the same thing? Solutions? Ideas?
2 Comments   [ + ] Show comments

Comments

  • Not sure if this will help or not, but we also will begin our patches during the day (start 3:45pm), but we have a popup notice alerting the users that patches are ready for deployment and they can snooze, or click ok to begin with the understanding that they may have applications close on them. Almost all our users opt to snooze until they leave for the day and let the PC patch overnight.
  • I'm fairly sure that this is a result of how Microsoft creates the updates. In my experience updates for Outlook have always required the client to not be running. This is why we prompt the user that updates are running. We install our updates in the evening, however, so there is less user impact.
    • I understand your point, but I've never seen this behavior with Outlook prior to the 2016 version.

All Answers

-1
Two ideas: (1) Use scripting to install independent of patching, or (2) Change user expectations

For (1), I'm assuming there's some way to invoke the patches and disable the closing of Outlook/Skype but I don't know if this is possible.

For (2), I might put Office 2016 patches in a separate patch schedule which includes a custom message like "Your Office programs are about to be updated, please close Outlook and Skype before clicking 'OK'"
Answered 04/14/2017 by: JasonEgg
Red Belt

  • Changing user expectations? I'd have an easier time convincing water not to be wet.
 
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