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Microsoft Releases Uber Pack for SharePoint 2013

Microsoft today released an "uber" package for SharePoint Server 2013, which facilitates IT pros adding the earlier released September updates.

On September 8, Microsoft announced the availability of September updates for both SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint 2010. However, only the latter product also received an uber package at that time. Microsoft promised delivery of an uber package for SharePoint Server 2013 at a later date, which turned out to be today.

An uber package is a kind of "mini-service pack." It's also called a "full server" package release by Microsoft as it will patch all of SharePoint's components. This release for SharePoint Server 2013 contains the September updates, but it's also a cumulative update and contains all of the component updates released for the server since the release of SharePoint Server 2013 Service Pack 1 (SP1).

A prerequisite to installing the September updates, and the uber package, for SharePoint Server 2013, is to have SP1 installed beforehand.

Microsoft also warned that the SharePoint 2013 Product Configuration Wizard (known as "PSCONFIG.EXE" or "PSCONFIGUI.EXE" with a graphical user interface) has to be run after applying the September SharePoint Server 2013 cumulative updates.

Besides keeping SharePoint Server 2013 up to date patch-wise, the September update adds a new cloud hybrid search capability," according Microsoft's Knowledge Base article 3080169. It will index all crawled content housed on premises plus content housed in Microsoft's Office 365 datacenters to deliver unified search results.

Microsoft announced this hybrid search capability with the rollout of SharePoint Server 2016 IT preview last month. The hybrid search capability will be supported for server versions all of the way back to SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft has indicated.