Microsoft Corp. today announced a new Custom Support Agreement (CSA) program for legacy products in an effort to help customers better manage their IT environments and give them more options when making product migration decisions — including the speed at which they migrate to new versions of products.

After a six-month process of gathering customer feedback, conducting customer focus groups and evaluating the program, Microsoft Services has restructured the CSA program to provide customers with the option of extending Custom Support coverage while they migrate to newer products.

Customers will be able to migrate their systems based on their specific situation, taking into consideration the CSA costs and Microsoft’s Support Lifecycle policy timeline. The program provides customers with control over how quickly they upgrade from one product version to another given budgetary and/or IT requirements. In addition to providing customers with more autonomy, the new model also streamlines pricing so that customers pay only for what they need on a per-device basis. Additional benefits to customers include, but are not limited to, these:

• Problem resolution for the legacy product
• Proactive distribution of security hotfixes for vulnerabilities labeled as critical and important by the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC)
• Access to existing database of security and nonsecurity hotfixes produced during the Mainstream Support phase
• Ability to request nonsecurity hotfixes for new bugs (for an additional fee)