With the recent enhancements done to the “Patches for Windows” to include more and more patch content, the size of the “Patches for Windows” external site has increased during the last year, in terms of number of fixlets available in the site.
Although we do regular clean-up of obsolete content (that is, the content that is superseded by more than 1 year) and move it to an archived site, the size of the “Patches for Windows” keeps on increasing, and we plan that this trend will continue over time.
The large amount of content in the “Patches for Windows” has an impact, not only on the agent evaluation loop cycle, but also on the time required to publish a new version of the site when updates to the content is required (for example during the monthly Microsoft Patch Tuesday).
The Patch team performed a deep analysis on the content we have in the site, with the goal of identifying fixlets that are obsolete, applicable to OS versions that are no longer supported by Microsoft or applicable to Microsoft Applications that reached the end of their life.
The result of this analysis allowed us to identify fixlets for the following OS versions or MS Applications, that are still available in the “Patches for Windows” site:
- Windows XP
- Windows 7
- Windows Vista
- Office 2003
- Office 2007
- Office 2010
- Office 2013* Windows 95 (yes, we have 12 fixlets applicable to Windows 95!)
- Windows 98
- Windows ME
- Windows NT
- Windows 2000
- Windows 8
- Windows 8.1
Even in the remote hypothesis that any customer is still using any of this content, we are no longer maintaining it, and hence we have decided to archive all this content to reduce the size of the “Patches for Windows” site, with an overall benefit for everyone.
The clean-up is scheduled to happen at the end of this month, and you will see a specific announcement in the forum.
If you have any doubts, questions or concerns, please reply to this post or contact the BigFix Support.