Time for some good news that I first heard at the ACA Summit in Daresbury. Yes, AppSense's patches and updates will now be distributed in the MSP file format. This will bring the Management Suite patches firmly into line with the industry standards that are used by the likes of Microsoft, Citrix, etc.
The idea is that you will now simply receive a patch for a hotfix or a feature release, unlike the current process where a full build is released with only the minor version number changing. As well as making the patches much easier to deploy using your tool of choice, this should also allow for a vastly easier rollback procedure, where you can simply uninstall the MSP rather than having to reverse the full upgrade process.
In addition, we should now have a much clearer delineation between fixes and features, rather than the somewhat muddled miasma of version numbers that we have currently. Private hotfixes (patches), and rollups of hotfixes (which will be known by the term Service Pack, a term Microsoft coined but seem to be abandoning) will be distinct from Feature Releases in that the hotfixes and service packs contain bug fixes but the Feature Releases introduce new functionality or behavioural changes.
The Environment Manager Agent will be the first to support patching, closely followed by the Environment Manager Console, Application Manager and the Management Center, with Performance Manager adding the ability to be patched at a later date. Personalization Server, for complexity reasons, won't be patched via MSP at present time.
So, all of the products that make up the AppSense Management Suite should, going forwards, now explicitly state if they are a Service Pack Release or a Feature Release. The intention is that most bug fixes will be dealt with as Private Hotfixes and Service Packs; Feature Releases will only contain new features, fixes to bugs that cause a change in behaviour and those fixes which cannot be incorporated into a Service Pack due to the technical limitations of MSP files. The version naming will appear as Version x Feature Release x or FRx, rather than x.x and Service Packs will be named Service Pack x or SPx. The actual build numbers will now only appear in the product consoles About box and in Programs and Features.
You can read more about this if you log into MyAppSense and click on the Product Patching link.