In my previous post, I showed you how to make a connection to a WSUS server, view clients reporting to the server and how to start and view the progress of a WSUS sync. In this post, I will show you how to view all of the updates on the server and look at the details of the updates.

Using the already made $wsus variable, you can take advantage of the GetUpdates() method to list out every single update that is available on the WSUS server to either approve or decline.

$wsus.GetUpdates()

You can get a lot of detailed information about each update such as the creation date, arrival date, kb article, installation/uninstallation behavior.

Listing the Installation Behavior of a patch:

$update = $wsus.GetUpdates() | Select -first 1
$update.InstallationBehavior

Listing the Uninstallation Behavior of a patch:

$update = $wsus.GetUpdates() | Select -first 1
$update.UninstallationBehavior

You can even generate a report of updates that have been approved using the IsApproved property.

Approved Patches:

$wsus.GetUpdates() | ? {$_.IsApproved -eq "True"} | Select Title,ProductTitles, KnowledgebaseArticles,`
SecurityBulletins, CreationDate, ArrivalDate

Likewise, you can use the IsDeclined property to report all patches that have been declined.

$wsus.GetUpdates() | ? {$_.IsDeclined -eq "True"} | Select Title,ProductTitles, KnowledgebaseArticles,`
SecurityBulletins, CreationDate, ArrivalDate

This snippet will report all patches that have been released in the past month:

$wsusserver = "wsusserver"
[void][reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.UpdateServices.Administration")
$wsus = [Microsoft.UpdateServices.Administration.AdminProxy]::getUpdateServer($wsusserver,$False)
$wsus.GetUpdates() | ? {$_.CreationDate -gt (Get-Date).addMonths(-1)} | Select Title,ProductTitles,`
KnowledgebaseArticles, SecurityBulletins, CreationDate, ArrivalDate

On a side note, if you ever wanted to know the descriptions for the various classifications for each update, such as Drivers, Critical Updates, Service Packs, etc… You can use this snippet to get the definitions:

$wsusserver = "wsusserver"
[void][reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.UpdateServices.Administration")
$wsus = [Microsoft.UpdateServices.Administration.AdminProxy]::getUpdateServer($wsusserver,$False)
$wsus.GetUpdateClassifications() | FT Title, Description -wrap -auto

Not really earth-shattering, but still something interesting.