Ice, Ice, Baby: A New SharePoint Update Model?

Size matters, especially when it comes to patching software. Updates to the next version of SharePoint will be smaller—and, it seems, more modular--resulting in less downtime for organizations.

Redmond Channel Partner reported on an IT Unity-hosted "webisode" during which Bill Baer, a Microsoft senior technical manager and Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint, compared the new update model to an ice cube tray.

If I’m understanding things correctly, the ice cube tray is the update. Each section of the tray is an installer package that can be updated, to a certain extent, in a specific arrangement.

Here’s how Baer put it:

"So, if we go back to this ice tray concept, we would start adding all of these MSIs and MSPs back into the icetray, which is representative of what an update looks like today from a SharePoint perspective,” RCP reported Baer as saying. “What you have is a number of MSIs and MSPs. Each one of these requires some service restart at any given point in time. And that's where you incur a lot of the downtime. And ultimately, when we begin to reduce this footprint and reduce that surface area, you end up with less service restarts and subsequently you end up with less downtime."

Makes sense--er, kind of. How might the ice cube tray model impact your SharePoint implementation?