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Now known as Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), the product formerly known as Software Update Services (SUS) and Windows Update Service (WUS), has been repeatedly delayed. Originally slated for spring of last year, The company says it hopes to ship a final version of the software in the next quarter of this year.

Aimed at small, medium and large sized companies, the free product is intended to provide a single point from which to update multiple computers with new updates from Microsoft in a timely and systematic

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The new system is supposed to be a comprehensive update suite for all Microsoft products and not just Windows. Microsoft says that on release WSUS will support the updates of a whole slew of products including Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Office XP, Office 2003, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE) 2000, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. As new Microsoft products are released, they will be included under the WSUS umbrella.

In addition Microsoft is promising to improve control over the update process, minimise network bandwidth usage and, as far as possible, not affect end users working during updates.

WSUS Server runs on Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 (SP4) and later and Windows Server 2003 while the client version runs on Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3) and later, Windows XP and later and Windows Server 2003.

The beta version of Windows Server Update Services can be found here.