Patch Impact Manager

The Patch Impact Manager (PIM) was previously offered as a separate product, and is now a native feature of FLEXnet AdminStudio Enterprise. It is designed to help speed up testing by identifying applications that will be affected by its rollout prior to deployment. This allows you to focus testing on those impacted programs in your environment so you can deploy patches with significantly less risk.

PIM analyzes the affect the patch will have on the runtime file dependencies of your catalog of packages (deployed applications) in relationship to those files that will be replaced by the patch. Patches normally include system files that would not actually be deployed by your packages- but it also detects any such conflicts that may exist between your packages and the patch to avoid any potential DLL conflicts.

Patch Impact Manager even presents you with a view of what patches are available from Microsoft along with all the file and registry entries they contain in a simple view shown here.

The Microsoft Patch Data File, mssecure.xml (a centralized repository which contains information about the currently published patches for all Microsoft products) is used by PIM to provide these details. The latest version of this data is shipped with AdminStudio, but Microsoft periodically updates this file. There is a configurable location for the file where you may specify a download location. InstallShield hosts its own copy (which is the default path) and there is an option to automatically download the patch data file at startup. There is a great deal of information provided: the title, link to the security bulletin and associated Knowledge Base article, a descriptive summary, what products are affected by the patch and what file and registry entries are contained in the patch.

For any patches you will be deploying, you simply press the "Import" button to download and import the patch into your catalog. Then, within Application Manager, you can easily see what packages (or OS snapshots) you have in your environment that would be affected by this patch so that you may focus your testing (or resolve any detected conflicts in with your packages).

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