Software Management (winget)

Software Management updates third-party applications, complementing Beacon’s separate Patch Management feature, which only covers Windows Update itself. Rather than a hand-rolled application catalog, Beacon leans on Windows Package Manager (winget), which already maintains its own database of installers and silent-update behavior. Windows-only.

Updating software

From a device’s kebab menu on Device Detail, choose Update Software (winget). There’s no confirmation dialog — this is treated as a non-destructive action. The agent runs winget upgrade against the endpoint and the raw output is surfaced verbatim in that device’s Command History, the same place Job and direct-command output appears.

This is a simple opt-in sweep, not a policy: there’s no scheduling, targeting, or allowlist yet. You trigger it per device, when you want it.

Because winget’s own machine-readable output isn’t reliable enough to parse consistently across versions, Beacon doesn’t attempt structured per-package success/failure reporting — read the Command History output directly. The endpoint needs winget already present to do anything.

Uninstalling software

The Software section on Device Detail can show an Uninstall action next to an installed application. It only appears when the application can be uninstalled silently — either it has a QuietUninstallString, or its UninstallString runs msiexec in a way Beacon can reliably append /qn /norestart to. Anything else gets no button at all: uninstall runs in a SYSTEM context with no visible desktop, so an installer that needs someone to click through a wizard would have nowhere to show its prompts and no way to complete.

Beta support

The dashboard-to-agent dispatch pipeline for winget updates is confirmed; actual winget upgrade execution has not yet been verified against real Windows hardware. Software Uninstall is confirmed for MSI-based and quiet-uninstall-capable applications.