What I've done in my environnement is Target Group and Sub-Group.
So I create a group named Server and one named IT. Under IT, I've created another group named "Users".
Initially the only PCs hook up to the server were the IT one. I then approved many and many updates that I didn't want to re-approve for normal User. When beta-testing was over, I start adding User's PCs to the "User" group. So they automatically got the updates by heritance from the IT group.
Now, when I wanna test an update before to release it to everyone, I approved it for IT but I block the heritance for this particular update. If everything's fine after a week, I reinstate the heritance of the approval.
Bill