“Important” drivers will start being targeted to WSUS.

WSUS Admins –

We would like to notify you of a change you will see starting next week. If your WSUS settings are configured to synchronize the “Drivers” update classification then your server will start syncing drivers designated as “Important.”

Important drivers are ones known to address a critical issue. Typically they fix a reliability issue that impacts use of the device or stability of Windows. Important drivers are subject to additional scrutiny and testing, relative to drivers offered optionally through WU to unmanaged clients. For more information, refer to the Windows Logo Program criteria for Important driver updates.

In the past, we heard feedback from the WSUS community that too many drivers for variants of similar hardware were crowding the admin consoles, because the drivers appeared identical in the admin console. Because of this feedback, we temporarily stopped targeting drivers to WSUS servers. We developed a solution to consolidate drivers that are applicable to multiple Plug and Play (PNP) IDs into a single driver update for you to manage and distribute. This drastically reduces the number of driver updates that need to be published, while ensuring you are receiving the latest driver updates that are proven to fix known issues. Even with this improvement, you will still see multiple driver updates for the same changes in some scenarios, but this should be less burdensome than before.

As a reminder, you can import any driver update to your WSUS server using the “Import updates…” action in your admin console. https://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/site/faq.aspx

- WSUS team

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 19, 2010
  I greatly appreciate this change but will this solve the 18,000+ driver entries in the WSUS GUI?  I've already purged their content but the fact that their entries still exist make the WSUS server extremely sluggish and also causes the MMC to crash from time to time.   Until I can get rid of these entries I still see the use of drivers in WSUS to be flawed because of the continual impact my WSUS environment has been plagued with.

• Anonymous
  September 20, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2011
  So, it's 9 months later. Was the change mentioned ever implemented? I’ve seen discussions of this issue back almost 3 years now and the problem still persists. I can’t enable Driver Updates without flooding my system with a Googolplex of unnecessary updates. OK, it’ might be closer to 20,000, but I am just hoping that isn't the "drastically reduce[d]" amount of driver updates. Maybe they shutdown the WSUS Group, since I see a GUID as publishing this article underneath the Heading. :)

• Anonymous
  October 11, 2011
  The comment has been removed