Brief

Microsoft extends support for business & developer apps

The company’s new Customer Support Agreement (CSA) programme for legacy products gives customers the opportunity to migrate based on their specific situation, taking into consideration the CSA cost and Microsoft’s support lifecycle policy timeline. The programme gives customers control over how quickly they upgrade from one product version to another given their budgetary constraints and IT requirements. In addition to providing customers with greater autonomy, the new model also streamlines pricing so that customers pay only for what they need on a per-device basis.

This announcement comes after the company changed its support policies to offer five years of mainstream support and an additional five years of limited paid support, known as ‘extended support,’ for its business and developer products.

Microsoft has offered custom support in the past, such as for Windows NT 4 where it initially pledged to offer only one year of support but later extended that to two.

Additional benefits from CSA are problem resolution for legacy products, proactive distribution of security hotfixes for vulnerabilities labelled as critical and important by the Microsoft Security Response Centre, access to the company’s existing database of security and non-security hotfixes produced during the mainstream support phase, and the ability to request non-security hotfixes for new bugs (for an additional fee).

Prior to this announcement, Microsoft’s business user could sign a two-year CSA once the extended phase of a product came to an end. Now the company has removed all caps on the number of years that it will continue to support a product, including writing hotfixes for security problems and providing paid support.