Add driver support for HP, Lenovo and Dell

As an alternative to directly accessing the catalogs, could PMPC simply shunt WSUS drivers into SCCM which otherwise does not synchronize them for unknown reasons?

FYI for future commentators, probably best to look to the MS model via Windows Update for Business that should go public in 2022 for driver management: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-new-windows-driver-deployment-service-coming-soon/

HURRY UP NOW

+1 for BIOS in app model

+1

I may not have been clear on my reference to Andrew in my previous comment. I'm referring to his Dell-BIOS-Application-Packager-for-SCCM solution on Github.

With Andrew Jimenez joining the Patch My PC crew recently, is this being revisited perhaps? I concur with the catalogs already being available, but your application creation function would serve a great purpose here to automate Dell and other manufacturers' BIOS and firmware updates. Yes, SCConfigMgr works great, but the application model would better serve computers that are already in the field.

I only hear good things about the SCConfigMgr solution!

The Dell Driver Catalogue doesn't work without Dell Inventory Collector Application  (DSIA) and it's BIOS updates don't work if you have a BIOS password set, also, the Dell Driver Catalogue is known to have poor QA, causing automatic subscriptions to it in SCCM/SCUP to occasionally fail because of poorly packaged  and malformed updates that need to be manually excluded.

SCConfigMgr's Driver Automation Tool is an option, they also have a number of Powershell scripts on Github. It's a bit clunky and I wish it wasn't so Package focused but it does the job.

UPDATE

A few things to note here. There are already free drivers catalog's from HP, Dell, and Lenovo now has their free catalog available to use directly in SCCM. We won't ever author a driver catalog just because the vendors already provide them here's our stance on driver catalog https://patchmypc.com/faq-scup-catalog#driver-catalog-support.

The only thing we may potentially do is allow the publishing of their catalog metadata through our publishing service. The issue here is their catalogs are massive, and it would be a lot of investment to try to create our own filters for publishing on top our their catalogs.

The good news is the SCCM product group is providing options now to publish the catalogs directly in the console. They are also working on filtering options that catalog vendors can make use of and full automation. This was available in preview in the 1906 technical preview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xz3ce5ezLk). It didn't ship in 1906 due to some bugs. The PG is targeting 1910 for the new third-party categories feature and full automation.

With that said, we think this new functionality (Hopefully in 1910) will provide all the capabilities to support driver catalogs natively in the console, so it's unlikely we will do anything for driver catalogs.

I'm going to mark this as a No Go for now, but we will review how the functionally in SCCM 1910 will look. We are working very closely with the product group on this feature improvement, and I think it will provide fully automated and selective driver publishing.

Justin

Thanks for the comment, John. We will keep this thread updated if there are any updates.

I'm with Alan on this one. We just bought PatchMyPC to use with SCCM and would love it if it would also provide updates for our Dell computers.

Thanks for the update @Alan. Have you seen some of the improvement on track for SCCM 1906 around third-party catalog automation here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xz3ce5ezLk? The new features in SCCM may help address your comment:

I know we can download the catalogs for the vendors but the ease of use within your product is much superior so I thought if we can have both the ease of use and the ability of PMP all in one place.

Hey Justin, yes it is a lot to ask due to the size of these catalogs but like William mentioned below we are considering another solution for patching due to the ability to update the Bios and vulnerable drivers in our environment. I know we can download the catalogs for the vendors but the ease of use within your product is much superior so I thought if we can have both the ease of use and the ability of PMP all in one place. It would stop our InfoSec team from considering a competitor. I am new to all of this so maybe I just don't know what I am taking about. 

Thanks

Alan

No worries. We can work around it. Thanks for taking the time to look at it.

Hey William, so what most important to you would be the ability to add driver catalogs into our catalog for publishing, correct? That would allow you to use the functionality native to out publishing service to custom scripts?

The main challenge on our engineering side is their catalogs are MASSIVE. It would be extremely challenging to give a detect filter option (Like our Update Rules) tab for external vendors catalogs.

We will think about this feature request, but I'm not sure if it will happen anytime soon if at all, mainly because of the complexity of not managing the catalog metadata.

Note: 1906 is going to have some very nice improvements driver catalog vendors can use for a better publishing experience for categories and full-content publishing. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xz3ce5ezLk for more info.

I'm not the original poster, but am one of the voters.

We moving from a competing product with a different set of features.

One of them was the ability to import other vendor catalogs, and then be able to add pre/post scripts, modify detection rules, add additional files, etc.

I would like the ability to import the Dell catalog in order to be able to add pre/post scripts to their packages. Or perhaps to apply the Auto Kill conflicting processes vendor wide if possible.

Using the official method referenced in your link does not give the ability to edit anything.

Can you provide a little more context here? There are already driver catalog available for these vendors more details here: https://patchmypc.com/faq-scup-catalog#driver-catalog-support

When you say you want then all in one place are you referring to the publishing of the drivers catalogs?

Justin