A patch management guide

All this talk about Windows XP Service Pack 2 has reminded me of New Boundary Technologies and its Prism Patch Manager product. After all, New Boundary wrote the book on patch management. Well, it sponsored the book anyway.

Realtimepublishers.com (frequently mentioned in this newsletter) has published "The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Patch Management, by Rod Trent, who is, as the press release puts it, "...widely acclaimed as the leading industry expert on Microsoft Systems Management Server." Fortunately, I know his work and he is, at least, a leading expert.

<aside> That's a cross-over inside joke; those of you who read the Identity Management newsletter (or, at least, the edition that comes out today), will understand. </aside>

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All this talk about Windows XP Service Pack 2 has reminded me of New Boundary Technologies and its Prism Patch Manager product. After all, New Boundary wrote the book on patch management. Well, it sponsored the book anyway.

Realtimepublishers.com (frequently mentioned in this newsletter) has published "The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Patch Management, by Rod Trent, who is, as the press release puts it, "...widely acclaimed as the leading industry expert on Microsoft Systems Management Server." Fortunately, I know his work and he is, at least, a leading expert.

<aside> That's a cross-over inside joke; those of you who read the Identity Management newsletter (or, at least, the edition that comes out today), will understand. </aside>

The book, important at any time, is especially important for those faced with making decisions about the deployment of SP2 and other gargantuan patch files that are sure to be coming from Redmond for Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Longhorn and beyond. Register for the book and begin downloading at http://www.newboundary.com/ebook while you're waiting for the SP2 files to download. Depending on the speed of your Internet connection, you might even finish reading the book before the patch downloads!

"The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Patch Management" looks at the situation facing corporate networks and examines the IT challenges of keeping users happy and safe and patches up-to-date, all at the same time. It includes an in-depth look at the impact of patch management on corporate security and risk management, lays out best-practice methodologies, and describes the tools that are available to manage this business-critical IT process, which is becoming both more complex, yet more strategic, all the time.

Like almost all realtimepublisher.com books, you will be exposed to the products of the sponsor, but like every single one of the books, you'll also learn about the topic from an acknowledged industry expert. The advertising content is almost always muted and low-key, and doesn't get in the way of the important information.

Still, New Boundary does have some interesting products. Besides the patch-management application there's also Prism Deploy, recently rolled out in a new version (Version 6). Check the online demo (register at http://www.newboundary.com/webex/webex_form.htm for the weekly sessions) or download (http://www.newboundary.com/sds/sds.htm) an evaluation version of the applications. It's a small price to pay for a book that can really help you right now.

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