We have been looking for a straightforward way to achieve a solution to the following:
- Patch "Early release": Day 0-1 of patch
- Patch "Test group": Day 3-5 of patch
- Patch "Wide release": Day 7 of patch
The idea is that you would have a controlled population to test patches against instead of pushing a bad patch to everyone at once. In Patch Policies, it appears it would have to be a matter of manually going in and editing the scope on those three targets. Once to include the first group, second to add the second group, and final edit to make availability all systems.
Otherwise, the way we see this could be done is by creating multiple policies outside of Patch Policy to handle this, by defining multiple "Activation dates" for the policies. This would lead to a massive expansion of our policies list and would lead to extra work for the content creator in addition to losing out on functionality found in the Patch Policy module.
So, question: How does your team most effectively manage these patches? Do you use Jamf and one of the identified solutions listed above, or do something different? Or, do you use an outside tool (a la BigFix) to handle 3rd-party patches?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
