Each month the Readiness teams analyses the patches applied to Windows, Microsoft Office and related technology/development platforms. We look at each update, the individual changes and the potential impact on enterprise environments. We hope that these testing scenarios offer some structured guidance on to best deploy Windows update to your environment.
Key Testing Scenarios
Given the large number of changes included in this October patch cycle I have broken down the testing scenarios into a high risk and standard risk groups:
High Risk: For this October update cycle, Microsoft has not recorded any high-risk functionality changes. This means that Microsoft has not update made major changes to core API’s or functionality to any of the core components or applications included in the Windows desktop and server ecosystems.
More generally, given the broad nature of this update (Office and Windows) we suggest the testing the following Windows features and components:
- A GDI update (GDIPLUS.DLL) requires testing of EMF both 16 and 32-bit palettes files (opening, printing and creating)
- Microsoft’s Desktop Application Manager has been updated which will require both provisioning and un-provisioning applications (both install and uninstall testing is required.
- The Windows CLFS system has been updated require a short test of creating, reading, updating and deleting log files
In addition, these changes and subsequent testing requirements, I have included some of the more difficult testing scenarios for this October update:
- OLE DB: The venerable Microsoft OLE DB has been updated and require all applications with a dependency on SQL Server 2012 or ADO.NET to be fully tested before this update’s deployment. This Microsoft COM component (OLE DB) separates data from application logic through a set of connections that access data source, session (s) , SQL command, and row-set data.
- Roaming credentials, cryptography keys and certificates: To find out more about Credential Roaming, check out Microsoft’s Jim Tienery’s “how-to” posting and this great introduction to Credential Roaming.
- Encrypted VPN Connections: Microsoft updated the IKEv2 and L2TP/IPsec components this month. Testing involving remote connects should last longer than eight hours. If you are having trouble with this update, Microsoft has published a L2TP/IPSec VPN Troubleshooting guide.
Unless otherwise specified, we should now assume that each Patch Tuesday update will require testing of core printing functions including:
- printing from directly connected printers
- large print jobs from servers (especially if they are also domain controllers)
- remote printing (using RDP and VPN’s)
Let us know if you think that we have missed anything for this update cycle.
