rob dipietro

Hello,

Overall I'm very impressed with MSBA, but I do have a few suggestions that
might make it more robust:

1. Instead of only indicating what patches are missing, it would be helpful
if it also gave a report of what version of what product is installed and
it's installed patches. I don't know how realistic this is (For example, IE
seems to keep fairly good track of what individual patches are installed,
not sure about other products). As a software developer working on a large
scale web project we sometimes run into issues where a patch adversely
affects our application. It would be great to have a tool that not only told
us what patches were missing, but what are also installed for diagnostic
purposes.

2. The ability to scan a remote computer by specifying a username and
password. As of now the remote scanning capabilities are only beneficial to
network admins.

Thanks for your time,

Rob DiPietro

doug neal [msft]

Rob - thanks for the suggestions.

If you're able to use MBSA in the HF mode (using MBSACLI /HF), you have the
ability to display all installed patches by using the "-history 1" option.
Additionally, you can specify the -u and -p options to specify a username
and password for a particular target machine.

If you need the additional features of security setting scans and Office
Patch Detection present in MBSA and MBSACLI (without the HF mode), you can
run MBSA using the Windows "Run As..." option and specify and alternate
username and password. In this mode (MBSA GUI or MBSACLI), there is no
option to view installed patches.

I hope that helps...

--


Doug Neal [MSFT]
dugn@online.microsoft.com

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