Microsoft recently released WSUS 3.0. WSUS is their free product for managing Windows Update content on Wintel machines in an organization. You can grab a copy of it here. Searching the Microsoft download site for "WSUS 3" or something similar yields a bunch of whitepapers which might be interesting as well.
I upgraded a simple WSUS 2.0 deployment to 3.0 and the installer seems to have taken care of everything nice and tidy. It did require that I install .Net 2.0 but that was inevitable and not a big deal. I was annoyed to learn at the end that a reboot was required but that was the only major problem. The biggest change from the previous version is probably the change to an MMC console from the web based UI. The MMC is somewhat faster although with all fo the other MMC 3 stuff I've used so far it seems a bit slower. The installer didn't check for the presence of MMC 3 prior to install and consequentially I got this error when I fired up the MMC after the reboot:
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Microsoft Management Console
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MMC cannot open the file C:\Program Files\Update Services\administrationsnapin\wsus.msc.
This may be because the file does not exist, is not an MMC console, or was created by a later version of MMC. This may also be because you do not have sufficient access rights to the file.
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OK
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This was easily resolved by downloading the MMC 3.0 update from Microsoft which did not require a reboot fortunately.
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#1 re: WSUS 3.0
Friday, May 04 2007 1:56 PM by Matthew Wetmore (MSFT)#2 re: WSUS 3.0
Thursday, September 13 2007 7:38 AM by EricaThanks for documenting the fact that it required a reboot, you saved me from finding that little "surprise" at the end :-P
#3 re: WSUS 3.0
Tuesday, December 02 2008 11:18 AM by ChrisI ran into the MMC update problem as well. Matt - Sure you can run and a server without MMC, but it's really not that hard on a box to have it on there. And besides, most people have some kind of rinky dink/old box or VM that hosts WSUS anyway. Thats my personal experience, anyway.
Anyway, best of luck.
#4 re: WSUS 3.0
Thursday, March 19 2009 3:56 AM by Pradeep.JAwesome, I was confused why the console was missing!
#5 re: WSUS 3.0
Friday, February 19 2010 5:05 AM by MackoI have had same problem, with WSUS 3.0 SP2 and Win 2003 Server. SP1 for Win 2003 server is a need.
Did you run the setup without UI?
The UI for setup does indeed check for MMC 3.0, but it's not a hard block. You can run and install a server just fine without MMC, you just have to administer it remotely from a machine that *does* have MMC 3.0 and the remote console.
This helps keep your server box less cluttered with extraneous stuff, if that's your model.