I drafted this post quite a while ago, but I’ve only just got around to completing it and posting it.
Recently, I was completing some out of hours work to apply the August 2012 Cumulative Update to our production SharePoint 2010 SP1 environment.
After completing the installation of the SharePoint 2010 Foundation and SharePoint Server 2010 update packages, I tried to run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard to initiate the timer job that upgrades the database schema, and it wouldn’t run, reporting that one of the servers was missing the updates that I had just installed.
When searching for the answer, I came across SharePoint Management Shell Cmdlet Get-SPProduct -Local. This useful little Cmdlet for PowerShell forces the local installation of SharePoint to rescan all of it’s installed components and by the looks of it, where needed, updates the SharePoint_Config database with the installed updates for the server. Before running the Cmdlet, I did an iisreset /noforce. Doing this ensures that the web applications are in a suitable state and reloaded with all the latest files.
After running these two commands, running the SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard successfully validated the servers and allowed the wizard to complete.