System and method for performing patch installation on multiple devices

摘要

A system and method of simultaneously installing a software patch or patches on multiple electronic devices is disclosed. The illustrative embodiment of the present invention provides a method of simultaneously installing a software patch on multiple electronic devices. The user selects the target devices upon which to install a patch or patches. One of the target devices is selected as a "reference device". The other target devices are validated against the reference device to ensure uniformity of attributes prior to attempting the patch installation. The validation process compares the architecture, operating system (OS) and target application attribute of the target devices to those on the reference device. After the reference device has been validated, patch dependencies on the reference device are programmatically checked to ensure that software required for the patch is present on the reference device (which has the same software found on the other validated devices). The installation of the patch is then performed simultaneously on the validated target devices as a parallel process.