Using SCCM to update remote servers

[LimeLover]

Hi all,

 

I work for an MSP that is trying out SCCM 2012 to see if we can use it in our daily work, So far it seems like a pretty sturdy(but as always, difficult) product.

 

I've been poking around with the SCCM guides on this website to use it as our local image DP so that we can easily deploy windows clients, which works like a charm! but I've been wondering on how to take this a step further.

 

We have servers from our clients which are connected to the internet, mostly SBS 2008 and 2011 servers. These clients have a support contract in which we run updates each month. Of course, sometimes this slips under the radar and needs manual intervention each time(admin logs into servers, starts windows updates, checks if they completed and plans a reboot.)

 

Of course we want to mimimize the times our admins spend on the servers for these simple automated tasks and also want a little more control over the machines.

 

Does anyone have an idea on how we can manage these machines updates via SCCM 2012? My idea was to install the client in these remote machines, make a software/update deployment task that runs automatically and has a deadline so all these servers update the same night.

 

But is this possible? Is this the best approach to solve this? Of course these machines all have their own domains and no trust with our SCCM machine(as this is of course impossible with SBS)

 

Thanks!

[anyweb]

regarding deploying updates, you can use maintenance windows on collections to decide when the updates are applied and you can use Automatic deployment rules to deploy the updates automatically, as long as the computers have the configmgr client installed on them and can receive policy from their management point they should be ok even if they are workgroup computers.