Microsoft recently announced that the Windows Autopatch service is now generally available to customers with Windows Enterprise E3 and E5 licenses. Microsoft will continue to release updates on the second Tuesday of each month, and Autopatch will help simplify update operations and create new opportunities for IT professionals.
Windows Autopatch is an enterprise service that automatically keeps software like Windows and Microsoft 365 up-to-date, and if users miss public preview announcements, Windows Autopatch automatically updates Windows 10/11, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft 365, and more. Essentially, Microsoft engineers use the Windows Update Client for Enterprise Policy and Deployment Services tool on behalf of users.
Windows Autopatch was first released in April, when Microsoft said it would be available for free to Microsoft customers with Windows 10/11 Enterprise E3 or later licenses starting in July 2022.
Microsoft provides the following steps that administrators must perform when enrolling a device in Windows Autopatch:
Locate the Windows Autopatch entry in Tenant Administration in the Microsoft Endpoint Manager Admin Center, select Tenant Registration, check the box to agree to the terms and conditions, then select Agree and register.
Once the device is registered with Autopatch, the service does most of the work. But through the Autopatch section in Microsoft Endpoint Manager, users can adjust ring membership, access service health dashboards, generate reports, or submit support requests. Microsoft says the reporting capabilities will become more robust as the service matures.
Windows Autopatch automatically divides a fleet of devices into four groups of devices, which Microsoft calls testing rings. Among them, the "test ring" contains the smallest number of devices, the "first ring" is about 1% of all endpoints in the corporate environment, the "fast ring" is about 9%, and the "broad ring" contains the remaining 90% of the devices. Updates are deployed gradually, starting on the test ring, and expanding to a larger set of devices after a validation period for device performance monitoring and pre-update metric comparisons. Windows Autopatch also has a built-in pause and rollback feature that prevents updates from being applied to higher test rings or automatically rolls back and helps resolve update issues.