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Update Baseline

  • Article
  • Applies to:
    ✅ Windows 10

Note

Update Baseline isn't currently available for Windows 11.

With the large number of different policies offered for Windows client, Update Baseline provides a clear list of recommended Windows Update policy settings for IT administrators who want the best user experience while also meeting their monthly update compliance goals. See Policies included in the Update Baseline for the full list of policy configurations.

Why is Update Baseline needed?

Update Baseline is an industry-tested solution that improves update adoption rates while also maintaining a high-quality user experience. Whether you're just starting out, or you have been configuring policies for years, Update Baseline can help get you to a known good state with an excellent user experience. Applying the baseline is especially helpful for organizations that have many years of policy configurations to clear out lingering misconfigurations.

You can use Update Baseline to:

  • Ensure that user and device configuration settings are compliant with the baseline.
  • Set configuration settings. You can use Group Policy to configure a device with the setting values specified in the baseline.

Update Baseline doesn't affect your offering policies, whether you're using deferrals or target version to manage which updates are offered to your devices and when.

Policies included in the Update Baseline

The Update Baseline configures settings in these Group Policy areas:

  • System/Power Management
  • Windows Components/Delivery Optimization
  • Windows Components/Windows Update

For the complete detailed list of all settings and their values, see the MSFT Windows Update.htm file in the Update Baseline toolkit at the Download Center

How do I get started?

The Update Baseline toolkit makes it easy by providing a single command for IT Admins to load the baseline settings into Group Policy Management Console. You can get the Update Baseline toolkit (included as a part of the Security Compliance Toolkit) from the Download Center.

Today, the Update Baseline toolkit is currently only available for use with Group Policy.