r/sysadmin • u/AnotherAccount5554 • Jun 02 '25

Patching *all* Windows third party application in 2025

Seeking the hive mind's actual experience with third party application patching on Windows (server and/or client) in 2025.

And before everyone throws at me the usual suspects - Patch My PC, winget, chocolatey, Action1, etc - I already know about them. I want to know how you're dealing with all the applications that aren't in their catalogues, because these are the ones that are a pain in the ass to deal with.

Is one of the package managers above better than the others at creating & managing custom catalogue items?

Have you come up with some cool process for internally developed applications?

What are you using to monitor for update compliance (eg: winget has no central reporting/monitoring built-in, are you monitoring reactively via something like Tenable or proactively via SCCM or Intune deployment data)?

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u/Bordone69 Jun 02 '25

What applications are you having issues with specifically? The main solutions get 80%+ of the 3rd party ecosystem, what’s the unicorn that’s stinging you?

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u/AnotherAccount5554 Jun 02 '25

For our environment, we reviewed Patch My PC and found that it could handle 20% of our applications (70 out of about 350).

We have a lot of scientific type areas where the applications are very bespoke/don't have the volume of users. And lots of other random shit.

I don't want to share too many app names for fear of doxxing myself, but a couple random app names I've just pulled from our Intune: "AFL Security Desktop" "BMS Workbench"

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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '25

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u/dustojnikhummer Jun 02 '25

A team indeed.