[German]A short piece of information for administrators of Windows systems who use WSUS to distribute updates. Microsoft is ending the synchronization of driver updates via WSUS, as was also announced in the tech community. According to Microsoft, driver synchronization for Windows will in future be carried out via a cloud service. Here is a brief overview of the situation.
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Administrators who previously used driver synchronization updates via Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) will soon have to rethink their approach. Microsoft has now officially discontinued this function. The relevant information was already published on 28 June 2024 in the Techcommunity article Deprecation of WSUS driver synchronization. I came across the information via various sources on the web and from readers, but have only now found the time to mention it here on the blog.
The decision was probably preceded by a Microsoft survey on the abolition of WSUS driver synchronization (which no one seems to have noticed, as I gather from the comments). Of the participants in the survey who use WSUS,
- only 34% said that they use it to synchronize drivers, and only 8% of respondents are concerned about potentially outdated drivers due to lack of WSUS synchronization.
- Most of these 34% of respondents also stated that they are in the process of implementing a different solution and do not anticipate any problems with deprecation.
So Microsoft decided to declare WSUS driver synchronization as deprecated. The current plan is to discontinue WSUS driver synchronization on 18, April 2025. For on-premises systems, the drivers will still be available in the Microsoft update catalog. However, according to Microsoft, these packages cannot be imported into WSUS. Administrators will have to use other means to distribute the drivers in their network from this date.
According to Microsoft, the driver updates will be managed via the Microsoft Cloud. In addition to Intune, Microsoft also suggests "Commercial driver and firmware servicing" as a solution in the Techcommunity article. Drivers and firmware updates can also be distributed via Windows Update for Business. Final question: Are any of you affected by this issue and do you expect problems?
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