Most of the software in our lab is managed via group policy through our active directory server, which means I can patch software by applying the .msp file (if it exists) to the network installation or by simplying adding a new network install point and having it upgrade the previous version of the software.
However, some software pacakges, for licensing or performance reasons, have to be installed on individual machines. Our licenses for Adobe Acrobat mean that we have different versions installed on different machines throughout the lab. Every computer has reader, but some also have Acrobat 7 or 8. To patch these machines, I did the following:
Downloaded the updates from the adobe site:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Windows
Use the ADMIN$ share on machines with Acrobat installed to store the patches, and run psexec from a control machine to install them.
For Acrobat 7, I only to install 2 updates on a couple of machines and I used the command line options I found on AppDeploy to run them.
msiexec /p c:\windows\temp\AcPr710.msp;c:\windows\temp\ AcroUpd711_all_incr.msp REINSTALLMODE=OMUS RINSTALL=All REBOOT=ReallySuppress /qn
For 8, I wrote a batch file to apply several updates in order, with the following format:
msiexec /p c:\windows\temp\AcrobatUpd814_all_incr.msp /q
AppDeploy Acrobat Pages:
http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/detail.asp?id=545
http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/detail.asp?id=431
http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/detail.asp?id=937