Windows – WSUS – Auto-approve only “Needed” updates

windowswindows-server-2008wsus

I'v looked through all the settings in the Automatic Approval menu, but it could not find anything about automatically approve only the needed updates.

Because if I check, for instance, to auto-approve only the "Definition updates", it will approve any Definition updates, whether they are needed by my workstations or not.

This is because I dont want my WSUS server to download and store updates that are not needed by any of my workstations.

Also we are a lazy SMB, and we dont want to waste time to manually approve updates and stuff.

Is this even possible ?

Best Answer

There is a third party tool called WSUS Smart Approve which is doing exactly that.

However, if you just need to auto-approve everything that is needed, consider not using WSUS at all but just let the clients download everything off the web. Bandwidth is cheap anyway and you may alleviate any contention problems by using a simple HTTP caching proxy which would be way easier to administer than WSUS.