What’s new in Windows Autopatch: September 2024

In today’s IT environment, ensuring that Windows updates are deployed quickly is critical to business productivity and employee satisfaction. Policy conflicts can hinder the update process, causing devices to not be updated and negatively impacting monthly patch compliance. That’s why we’re excited to highlight that you can now use a PowerShell script with Windows Autopatch to resolve policy conflicts.

Let’s take a look at what causes policy conflicts and, more importantly, how to easily resolve them using a PowerShell script.

How conflict begins

For Windows Autopatch to successfully deliver updates to enrolled devices, it is critical that policies for the service are successfully targeted and assigned to the devices.

Conflicts occur when there are two or more policies in a tenant and they update the same setting with different values. Policy conflicts can become more common in environments that rely on Microsoft Configuration Manager and Group Policy Objects (GPOs), as Windows Autopatch deploys Microsoft Intune policies to enrolled tenants and continuously monitors Microsoft Intune policies.

When Windows Autopatch detects a policy in your tenant that conflicts with the settings in an Intune device policy, the service provides a notification. The notification includes details about the conflicting policy, the settings, and the Microsoft Entra ID group to which the device is assigned. It also provides recommendations and actions that you can take to ensure that the expected policy is successfully assigned to the device. More information about the policy conflict notification preview can be found here: Previous version of new features in Windows Autopatch.

How to resolve policy conflicts using PowerShell

PowerShell scripts are versatile tools that can handle many tasks, including ensuring that services and resources are functioning correctly. In particular, when dealing with policy conflicts, PowerShell scripts can help Windows Autopatch automatically fix policy conflicts that affect Windows Update. For example, you can use a detection script to detect and log certain Windows Update policy settings that may be preventing updates from being deployed correctly. You can then fix Windows Update policy conflicts with a script that removes certain registry keys that may be preventing updates from being deployed successfully. The fix script prepares the log file, defines the file name, and sets the directory where the script’s output will be written, or creates the log directory if it does not already exist.

Once you resolve the conflict, the update will be applied to your devices on the next Intune sync. This system refreshes every 24 hours, so it may take up to 72 hours for changes to take effect after a conflict is resolved.

For step-by-step instructions and access to recommended detection and remediation scripts, see: Windows Autopatch: Automatic fixes using PowerShell scripts.

Policy health contributes to compliance and security.

As IT environments become more complex and specialized skill sets become rarer, managing everything effectively can be a challenge. This challenge can be amplified when IT departments are under pressure to optimize budgets and improve service delivery. Windows Autopatch helps make update management easier and gives you more control over the update process by maintaining policy state and ensuring that policies are properly configured and deployed.

To learn more about Windows Autopatch Join Microsoft Ignite In November. You can also visit us. WebsiteRead ours documentationand Explore the Demo.

Stay tuned for more updates and thank you for joining us on this exciting journey towards a smarter, more efficient future.

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