The difference between supportability and patching

I’m at the annual MVP Summit this week, and everything we hear and see is pretty much NDA (except for pictures of Flat Tony). However, we just had a really interesting discussion that I think is safe to abstract here.

A couple years ago I wrote a post about what it means to be supported or unsupported. What I wrote then still stands: when Microsoft says something is unsupported, there can be multiple reasons for that label, and you do whatever-it-is at your own risk.

Microsoft’s support policy for Exchange 2013 can be summed up as “N-1”: when they release a new cumulative update (CU) or service pack, that version and the previous version are considered to be supported. So, in the fullness of time, when we get Exchange 2013 CU7, then CU6 and CU7 will be the officially supported versions.

It’s very clear that there’s a lot of confusion about what “supported” means in this context. Microsoft product support will always support you if you call for help with a product that’s within its lifecycle window. Call them today and ask how to configure Exchange ActiveSync on Exchange 2010 RU2, they’ll help you. Call to ask about an issue you’re seeing with DAG failover in Exchange 2013 CU2, they’ll help you. Call for help with Exchange 2003, and they may even help you on a best-effort basis.

What they won’t do is create fixes for bugs or problems in unsupported versions.

If you call them and say “hey, I’m having this problem with Exchange 2013 SP1,” they will help you troubleshoot it. If it’s a known problem, they may tell you “update to CU5 or later”– but Microsoft will not create a hotfix or IU that fixes that problem in SP1, or any other older version that’s outside that N-1 boundary.

So: help always, bug fixes only within the support boundary. Tell your friends.