No more Microsoft Security Bulletins after January 2017

Microsoft has a long tradition of publishing Security Bulletins to share information about patches and security fixes that it releases. But starting next year this is going to change.

As of February 2017, Microsoft will make use of the newly launched Security Updates Guide database. This, on the face of it, sounds like a great idea -- a searchable database of information -- but it changes the way information is presented and is unlikely to be well-received by users.

The announcement was hardly shouted from the hilltops -- it was a little afterthought tacked on the end of a short blog post: "Security update information will be published as bulletins and on the Security Updates Guide until January 2017. After the January 2017 Update Tuesday release, we will only publish update information to the Security Updates Guide".

The main point of the blog point is to point out the existence of the new database, of which Microsoft says:

This month we released a preview of our new single destination for security vulnerability information, the Security Updates Guide. Instead of publishing bulletins to describe related vulnerabilities, the new portal lets our customers view and search security vulnerability information in a single online database.

Is this a good idea? That remains to be seen...

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