Catching up.

There’s been plenty to write about lately… the most obvious probably being WSUS accidentally installing WDS on unsuspecting machines and Google’s launch of OpenSocial.  Sadly, I’ve been neglecting my blog for a while now, so today I’m going to try and catch up a bit.

I hope that the WSUS issue has already been addressed for everybody affected by it.  But for the record, here’s the post I made in a couple of forums the day it happened:  

Here is my understanding of what happened. No one on the WDS product team knew about this until this morning (I was the first to know, because of an extremely impolite e-mail sent to my personal e-mail account).

• It was a screw-up, and everyone involved is deeply sorry about the trouble this has caused
• It ONLY affects WSUS systems where admins had approved an earlier WDS Update package
• The previous packages only updated existing WDS installations, and wouldn’t install it on new systems
• It was intentional to offer a package that would install WDS on machines without it
• It was NOT intentional for the approval of the previous update to be “inherited” by this package. This was a mistake in the publishing of this package to WSUS.

They have suspended deployment of the WDS package via WSUS while they fix the problem, and provided instructions for how admins can most easily disable and remove the WDS software.Believe me, Microsoft and the WDS team did not intend for this behavior. There was never any secret plan to force WDS onto unsuspecting machines. It was simply an error in the WSUS publishing process, which everyone deeply regrets.

As someone who used to work in IT, I feel the pain of these admins. This is also pretty embarassing for our team even though it could have happened to any group at Microsoft, as the WSUS publishing process is completely out of our control. That said, please don’t think that anyone here is taking this mistake lightly.

Even though our official responses may have appeared slow throughout the day, you can be sure that today was a non-stop fire drill for all involved. Once we identified and understood the problem, it took time to coordinate an official response and go through all the necessary approval processes. Unfortunate as that is, it’s the reality of a business this size, and our guys did their best to push through it and get this handled as best as we could after figuring out what happened.

For any further details, I refer you to the WSUS Blog.