I am new to Bigfix and I have a question as it relates to approving patches. Let’s say I have PCs that have .NET 4.5.1 installed and I go ahead and approve patches that apply to .NET 4.5.2. Does this automatically upgrade the computers to .NET 4.5.2 ?
The reason I’m asking is because I come from a Microsoft WSUS background and that was the behavior of WSUS.
Another example would be if I approve patches for Internet explorer 11, does it automatically deploy IE11 to all the PCs (even though they may currently just have IE9) ? Again, this is what happens with Microsoft WSUS so I’m trying to understand the behavior of Bigfix.
Behavior would depend on the patch in question. You will get the same results with BigFix as if you manually installed the patch.
If you currently have IE9 installed, a patch for IE11 should not even be relevant. You would need IE11 installed first for the Relevance to return TRUE for each element.
If a patch is relevant and the patch installs “.NET 4.5.2” and you deploy this patch as an action, then the machines will get that patch installed by BigFix and then it should have “.NET 4.5.2” installed, which you can check with relevance / properties / analyses.
If a particularly computer is not relevant for the patch, then it will not have “.NET 4.5.2” installed as a result.
Generally the patches provided by IBM require a previous version of the same software to already be installed for the patch to apply. This is not the case for all BigFix content like that found on https://bigfix.me
If you wanted to deploy “.NET 4.5.2” to all computers regardless of what version of .NET they currently have installed, then you would need to create a fixlet or task that would do this. This would be more similar to deploying software with SCCM rather than with WSUS.