What, you may ask, is happening on February 12th? Microsoft is releasing Internet Explorer 7 as an Update Rollup. What does this mean? It means that if you’ve intentionally NOT released IE7 to your workstations and servers due to compatibility or other issues, you might need to take some action to keep things that way. Here are the conditions that have to be met for the automatic IE7 push to happen to you on February 12th:
- You use WSUS 3.0 to manage updates in your organization.
- You have Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2)-based computers or Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1)-based computers that have Internet Explorer 6 installed.
- You do not want to upgrade Internet Explorer 6 machines to Windows Internet Explorer 7 at this time.
- You have configured WSUS to auto-approve Update Rollups for installation.
By default, Update Rollups are not configured for automatic approval, so if you’ve never changed your default settings, you’re probably OK, but it wouldn’t hurt to double-check, just in case. In WSUS, bring up the Options pane and click on Automatic Approvals. There is a Default Automatic Approval rule that WSUS creates at install. Check the “When an update is in” line and look for Update Rollups. If you see it listed, just click on the list to bring up the selection box:
and uncheck Update Rollups. For more information, check out the KB article that Microsoft has posted regarding this update.