Best approach to update and apply CUs for SharePoint farm . should i manually install CU or i should use windows update

Question

I got confused on how i should update my SharePoint 2013 farm. for example now my windows update tool mentioned that i have 4 updates for SharePoint 2013 regarding December 2014 CU. now some articles says that it is better to manually install these updates while other are saying that using windows update tools is the recommended approach since it will only show the necessary updates based on my current farm settings. can anyone adivce on this please?

Answer 1

As per my little experience with SharePoint and A lot of Discussion with MSFT folks. I come to this Point

• First, you have to make sure you need CU to Fix a problem in your Farm
• Dont apply those CU /Fixes from Windows Update.Always Turn off Automatic Update on Server
• Dowload the CU from MSFT site and apply.

You need to plan it, test it, schedule a down time. Many problems if your automatic updates enabled and you never know if a fix applied which need Config wizard to be run.

Read this Blog, will clear you alot of things: SharePoint patching demystified