Software Updates and painful search filters

Greetings all,

I'd really like to hear if anyone has any tips for ways to make update searching and filters work better than the only way I have found them to work.

For this client I am migrating them from WSUS, so where practical I am also duplicating the same workflow. Where possible I will improve it to work with features that ConfigMgr has that WSUS didn't provide.

Each month when assessing updates, they have a WSUS view that includes pretty much all products *except* IE and Server OS. When trying to translate this filter to ConfigMgr, I'm finding the limitations of the UI extremely frustrating.

1. In WSUS, if you select a "product group" from the product list (e.g. Developer Tools...) then it will automatically include all the products under that group. In CM12 those product groups are not presented and the only option seems to be adding  the Product filters multiple times, one for each product in the group
2. Likewise in WSUS, it's easy relatively easy to select multiple products, and then exclude (untick) the ones you don't want (e.g. IE). In CM12 it seems you can only do this by also adding multiple Product filters, one for each product. The CM12 dialogue doesn't allow multi-select at all

I have two approaches at the moment:

1. Create one HUGE saved-search with > 23 individual "Product" entries in the filter
2. Create a single search for ALL "required not deployed" updates, add all results to a temp Update Group. Then use another saved search on that Group for the products to exclude and remove them from the Group. This is simpler, but prone to problems if the operator doesn't remove the excluded products correctly.

I'm wondering if anyone has thoughts about other strategies I could consider, or what other tips/tricks you may have developed to deal with the update requirements of "the real world"

Scott.