Self Service Portal for patches

In large organizations and enterprises, patching critical machines and servers is a crucial task. The allotted maintenance time for these machines are usually limited, which causes the sysadmins to face the threat of downtime thus resulting in productivity drops. The Self Service Portal for patches simplifies the deployment process and ensures the users productivity is not dwindled, by letting the administrators publish the patches to the Self Service Portal from where the users and servers owners can have the freedom to decide whether to install the updates based on their requirements.

Publishing patches to Self Service Portal

Admins can publish the patches to Self Service Portal on the Patch Manager Plus server by navigating to Deployment. From there, you can either choose Manual Deployment or Automate Patch Deployment based on the organization's needs. The published patches are then listed on the Self Service Portal in the Patch Manager Plus's agent tray. Users and server owners can then decide to patch their machines based on their requirements.

Manual Deployment

If you choose to go with Manual Deployment, follow the given steps to install patches,

• Navigate to Deployment -> Manual Deployment -> Install/Uninstall Patch.
• Choose the required Operating System and then create a configuration by adding the necessary patches that need to be installed.

Self Service Portal is currently available for Windows and Linux.

• You can then view the deployment options Deploy and Publish to Self Service Portal (SSP) under the deployment settings.

Deploy : This option allows you to deploy the selected patches to the targeted endpoints based on the appropriate deployment policies. Additionally, admins can publish patches to the Self Service Portal after scheduling a deployment, enabling them to install them even before the scheduled deployment date.

Publish to Self Service Portal (SSP) : This option empowers admins to publish the selected patches to Self Service Portal from where the end users and server owners can start the installation process at their convenience.

You can then deploy the patches to the defined targets.

Automate Patch Deployment

• Navigate to Deployment -> Automate Patch Deployment (APD) -> Automate Task.
• Select the applications based on the updates and severities and click on Next.
• You can see the deployment options Deploy and Publish to Self Service Portal (SSP) in the Choose Deployment Settings.

• Choose Deploy to distribute the patches by applying the suitable deployment policies or publish the patches to Self Service Portal to install them before the scheduled deployment date.
• You can also click on the Publish to Self Service Portal (SSP) option to install it directly from the Self Service Portal.

Providing users with access to the Self Service Portal for Windows systems

On the target machine, the Self Service Portal will be added to the agent tray, start menu, and as a desktop shortcut once the patches are successfully published for the first time.

• Go to Admin tab -> SoM Settings -> Agent Settings -> Agent Tray Icon.
• Enable Show Agent Icon in the System Tray.
• Make sure Show Self Service Portal Menu is enabled.
• Click on Save Changes.

FAQs

1) Who can initiate Self Service Portal in Linux systems?

Currently, Self Service Portal functionality is limited to root users.

2) Can Self Service Portal be triggered without using the GUI?

Currently, Self Service Portal cannot be triggered if the GUI is unavailable.