Customers don’t want these notifications anymore, it says

Jan 9, 2015 10:51 GMT  ·  By

Starting this month, Microsoft will no longer issue public advance security notifications before Patch Tuesday, deciding instead to release them through its private channels only to customers with Paid support contracts and other companies working with it on security projects.

In a post published this morning, Microsoft said that its decision to make the Advance Notification Service private is mostly based on users’ choice because they no longer want to get this information “in the same way they did in the past due to optimized testing and deployment methodologies.”

Other channels for getting information on the Patch Tuesday updates that Microsoft plans to release each month are still available and the company says that everyone should start using myBulletins, which is a service that provides details for each user, based on the software running on their computers.

What were the advanced notifications?

Basically, Microsoft used these advance security notifications to let users know that their systems would get patched and to prepare system administrators for the next Patch Tuesday rollout.

These notifications were usually released the Thursday before Patch Tuesday, which takes place on the second Tuesday of each month.

The first advance notification was issued more than 10 years ago when Microsoft officially introduced the Patch Tuesday program.

“User behavior has changed”

Microsoft says in the TechNet post that myBulletins is basically the best choice to keep an eye on software solutions getting patched because the user behavior has changed dramatically over years and everyone is now seeking personalized reports based on their software.

“Rather than using ANS to help plan security update deployments, customers are increasingly turning to Microsoft Update and security update management tools such as Windows Server Update Service to help organize and prioritize deployment. Customers are also moving to cloud-based systems, which provide continuous updating,” the company said.

myBulletins is available completely free of charge and can be used by any individual or organization to keep track of patches for software running on their computer.