IBM Power Ideas Portal
This portal is to open public enhancement requests against IBM Power Systems products, including IBM i. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).
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Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use
Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.
IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.
ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.
The ability to check for updates is already available. From the main GUI, Edit->Preferences, check the box "Notify when update is available". This does not check the location from which the product was installed like the legacy Client Access product did. It checks a location on the internet and lets the user know when the update is available. So the difference here will be that a connection to the internet is required in order to see that updates are available.
Regarding your use case scenario, while Client Access was able to check to see when updates were available (when it was installed from an IBM i), the updates to the PC were not done automatically. The updates would only be applied if the user took action which would include at least one reboot of the PC. Each system where the product was installed would have to be either manually updated by user intervention or an administrator would have to use push technology to update their PC's.
There are many different ways ACS can be deployed. One of the ways mentioned in the following article (Option 3) may be what you're looking for. It can be placed at a central location and you can have all your users start the product from there. This gives you just one location that has to be updated and your users really will get the updates automatically the next time they start the product. For specific details how to do that, see the following article:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibmi/library/i-ibmi-access-client-solutions-customization-trs/