We don’t really have a dedicated SharePoint Administrator so we’re trying to figure out how often we should be applying SharePoint patches or cumulative updates to our farm.
In your opinion, is it better to:
- Apply them right away whenever they come out
- Wait until a couple come out and then apply them on a -2 schedule
- Wait until a service pack comes out and apply them all at once
- Only apply a patch if it fixes a specific issue that you are experiencing or a potential security threat
- If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – don’t do anything until you upgrade to SharePoint vNext
For CUs, #4. If a Service Pack comes out, let others test it a while and then do your own testing.
No staging, but we have a dev and a test environment. Â The test environment is very close to prod, but not exactly. Â So that could be an issue…
My instinct tells me that Security & Critical patches should get applied to the server ASAP (via WSUS policy, so hands-free)… but that instinct has been changing recently.
I’ve heard from some pretty smart SP folks that you should lag behind a version on CU’s… just in case, you know, something breaks from the update (like that ever happens rite?)
I will typically go for answer #4, but all CUs/SPs have issues of one variant or another, so it behooves the SharePoint Administrator to keep track of known SharePoint issues that the community and Microsoft have identified.
I do not agree with #5 or generally #3. Â There are a lot of ‘over time’ improvements that you’ll miss out on if you just wait for a Service Pack or vNext (which is a tremendous undertaking).
