International Business Machines Corporation

Hilar Hittinger

Gerhard A Widmayer

Michel Casabona

Rainer Hapatzky

The present invention relates to a method and system for maintaining software products installed on client systems via network. It can advantageously be provided a hierarchy of overlay repositories, for example 'country level' and 'system level'. Country level repositories may contain national language support, code page definitions and other common customizations and add-ons specific for the plurality of clients of a whole country. A dedicated command is issued to a system or to a group of systems. Said command goes through the repository hierarchy&#x2014;from local to top-level or reversed, local data overwrites central data&#x2014;and creates a list of files. That list contains per file the location in the repository where it will be taken from during the later download.

Growing community of inventors

Eningen, Germany

Hilar Hittinger