Surface 3/Pro 4/Book updates available in WSUS!

This news will be a very happy one for IT Pros managing Surface devices in a corporate environment.

MS-Surface_rgb_Blue

You might already know that until now, you had only 2 choices to manage drivers and firmware updates for Surface devices:

  1. Download and install from Microsoft Update
  2. Download the MSI version of the drivers/firmware update and deploy it either manually or by another management tool (like SCCM)

WSUS wasn't part of this equation because we were using a detection mechanism for Surface drivers that was compatible with Microsoft Update but not WSUS.

Things have recently changed and you can finally see those Surface updates in WSUS and deploy them that way! Those updates only concern Windows 10.

Microsoft Update Catalog

For any update to appear in WSUS, it first needs to be available in Microsoft Update catalog. To sync those updates to WSUS, we need to know their product and classification.

To verify that the Surface updates are available in the Microsoft Update catalog, navigate to this URL. If you search for the word "Surface", you will see updates listed as below:

MUCatalogSurface

 

We see that Surface updates appear under:

  • Product: Windows 10 and later drivers; Windows 10 and later upgrade & servicing drivers (you can select either one)
  • Classification: Drivers

WSUS

Now let's enable those product and classification in WSUS.

WSUSWSUS2

Then you just need to sync WSUS with Microsoft Update. Once the sync is finished, you can search in WSUS for the word "Surface" and you will see those Surface updates appearing in WSUS.

WSUS3

Happy management of Surface devices!!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2016
    Will this be possible via SCCM ? I don't have the driver classification.
    • Anonymous
      March 28, 2016
      For now, it's unfortunately not possible. SCCM (even in its latest version 1602) doesn't offer the "drivers" category. I hope it will be possible in the future but until then, you should continue deploying Surface updates using the MSI package.
  • Anonymous
    July 11, 2016
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 09, 2017
    Has anyone been able to get this to work? I can see the "Microsoft driver update..." when I search WSUS but there's hundreds of them. Nothing appears for Surface devices in the All Updates or Drivers section of WSUS. Does WSUS not track which update is needed for specific clients?
  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2017
    The comment has been removed