Patch Connect Plus offers patching of third-party applications in SCCM in three different editions - Standard, Professional and Enterprise edition. Standard edition offers simple publishing of patches within the console for versions 1806 and above, using CAB files. Whereas, both Professional and Enterprise edition offers more advanced console that comes with several features like deployment customization, auto-detection and publishing of applications, a native plug-in, and an extensive catalog of third-party applications for all the versions of Microsoft SCCM.
Standard edition, being dependent on SCCM console for publishing the third-party catalogs, comes with a limited application support due to several technical constraints.
Here are the technical limitations that make the count of applications for Standard edition go down.
Microsoft doesn't support downloading certain applications directly through SCCM. This issue occurs when the download URL provided by the vendors have blank spaces or special characters in them. This includes some applications like Mozilla, Dropbox etc.,
Microsoft generally requires a code signing certificate in applications to validate the vendor's authenticity. This error occurs when some open-source vendors fail to attach a code signing certificate with the applications. This makes applications like 7-zip, OpenOffice incompatible to patch.
Microsoft SCCM supports patching of applications only when they're available in certain formats. If they aren't, they require pre-handling scripts to make it compatible with the requirements of SCCM. So, this makes some applications like Autodesk not supported in SCCM.
Some third-party updates require uninstallation of their previous versions installed in the machines, for successful deployment. However, SCCM doesn't support the uninstallation of previous updates. So, this makes some popular applications like Adobe Shockwave player, Apple iTunes unfit to patch in SCCM.
Several third-party applications including Java, require login credentials to their respective accounts to download the updates. As SCCM doesn't support this yet, some applications remain incompatible.