Success with deployment of a patch begins with defining the community of machines that are candidates, or targets for deployment of a particular patch. With EnterpriseAM, the additional information of what is NOT installed is added to the investigation, helping to better define the community.

Narrowing down the patch itself requires multi-faceted patch reporting mechanisms. With file properties, registry entries and WMI data maintained in the Eracent Software Audit File, users can take advantage of continual updates that are published multiple times a day to the audit file to be sure that they have the right patch or hot fix. Patches are associated with their operating system so that the patch can only be deployed to a machine with the matching operating system.

With an SMS bundle ID associated with the packages, patches and hot fixes in the Eracent Software Audit file, EnterpriseAM can detect the presence of that bundle and report on the success or failure after the deployment. This secondary audit query can be scheduled and run automatically. Detailed information about the success or failure of SMS deployments are captured and summarized in reports. Users may drill down to see details such as the reason for failure, which packages failed, the domain where the failure occurred, user information such as login, location or any of the other demographic fields associated with the machine.