Review Your Windows Update for Business Deferral Values

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Call to action: review your Windows Update for Business deferral values

By John Wilcox | April 3, 2019

 
With Windows Update for Business, an organization can take advantage of cloud-delivered updates, while still creating and managing a ring-based deployment approach. Using Windows Update for Business deferrals, you can group devices into deployment rings to control and manage the deployment of both monthly quality updates and semi-annual feature updates.

If devices under your management are still running Windows 10 Pro or Windows 10 Pro for Workstation, version 1703, your devices will reach end of service on April 9, 2019 if you have configured both of the following Windows Update for Business policies:

Branch readiness is configured as Semi-Annual Channel (SAC)
Feature update deferral is configured as 274 days or more

In order avoid this, you need to set your feature update deferral policy to 273 days or less.

To calculate the maximum number of deferral days you can configure and remain in service…

 
Read the full article here (link updated, thx @netdef)

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woody, NetDef

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URL changed:  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-IT-Pro-Blog/Call-to-action-review-your-Windows-Update-for-Business-deferral/ba-p/394244

(Don’t you hate it when MS Blog does that?)

 

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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Kirsty, woody

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Permit me to translate:

When we announced Windows Update for Business – not really an update branch, but a hodge-podge of individual settings – we didn’t think through the implications of all of the available options.

Although we’ve changed the meanings of the terms, and deprecated the “SAC” branch entirely, our arbitrarily applied 60-day waiting period for SAC, coupled with a moderately large feature update deferral setting (between 274 and 365) means that you won’t get updates at all, and your Win10 1709 machines will sit unpatched forever.

Please correct our mistake by changing your update deferral setting.

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NetDef

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That’s pretty much aligned with how I translated it.  Specific to the big change is V.1709’s status – it got caught right in the waste-land in between.

 

Note that the MS Blogs advice does NOT apply to other W10 versions at this time.

For those that miss the deadline – don’t stress out.  You can upgrade those workstations anytime you want – you just won’t be getting 1709 cumulative/security patches after April 9th – which should be the last patch for 1709 released.

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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Kirsty, woody

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woody wrote:

Although we’ve changed the meanings of the terms, and deprecated the “SAC” branch entirely, our arbitrarily applied 60-day waiting period for SAC, coupled with a moderately large feature update deferral setting (between 274 and 365) means that you won’t get updates at all, and your Win10 1709 machines will sit unpatched forever.

Recent changes like the three you mention haven’t affected this situation with 1709, and couldn’t do so. SAC-T didn’t disappear for previous versions, and +60 days only applies for 1903. It’s the same situation for 1709 now that Susan Bradley highlighted with 1703 six months ago:

Susan Bradley wrote:

And note that you can set a deferral for longer than the platform is supported on the Pro version. For example Windows 10 pro only gets an 18 month window of support for security updates until you have to upgrade to the next feature release. So you could put in place a 365 day deferral and then end up where your version (Windows 10 1703 for example) fell out of support last month.

But as noted at the end of yesterday’s blog entry, this situation will not apply to future versions, because of the elimination of SAC-T; “… which will also prevent a device from reaching end of service due to a deferral policy.”

Windows 11 Pro version 22H2 build 22621.2361 + Microsoft 365 + Edge

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