Welcome to another edition of Monitoring MSFT, where we serve up the Microsoft news that managed service providers (MSPs) care about on a weekly basis. This week we’ll look at the most recent Patch Tuesday, some changes to Microsoft’s advance notification service, the end to mainstream support for Windows 7, an Azure Data Center Migration solution and more.

But let’s kick off with Patch Tuesday, which happened yesterday. Microsoft issued eight security updates this week, one of them designated as critical. Check out the full list over at Windows IT Pro here.   

Advance Notification Service ends

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Microsoft is pulling the plug on its advance notification service. As defined in this Microsoft blog post, “Our Advance Notification Service (ANS) was created more than a decade ago as part of Update Tuesday to broadly communicate in advance, about the security updates being released for Microsoft products and services each month. “

“Update Tuesday” is Microsoft’s term for what everyone else calls Patch Tuesday.  The good news is that Windows IT Pro (which is owned by Penton, the parent company of MSPmentor), is prepping something that will help organizations that use this service. Stay tuned.

Windows 7 SP1 mainstream support ends

Guess what else Microsoft is pulling the plug on this week? Mainstream support for Windows 7, SP1.  Mary Jo Foley explains just what this means in a blog post here. She says: “Nobody panic. This does not mean Microsoft is going to stop issuing security fixes for Windows 7 SP1 tomorrow. Or anytime soon, for that matter, unlike some of its competitors (cough, Google, cough). ‘Mainstream support’ is the period during which Microsoft provides for free security and non-security updates and telephone support for its products. ‘Extended support’ — the period during which Microsoft continues to provide for free security updates for products — doesn’t end until January 14, 2020 for Windows 7 SP1.” Good to know. (No need to migrate my my kids’ Minecraft Server yet.)

Azure and Ubuntu Linux

Foley also reported recently that Microsoft’s most recent set of updates to Azure include its first Docker image for Ubuntu Linux in the Azure Marketplace. What’s Docker? Check out our previous coverage of Docker at MSPmentor here.

Free Azure migration tool

Finally, here’s news of Version 1.0 of Azure Data Center Migration Solution, developed by Microsoft and developer partner Persistent Systems, as reported by Redmond Channel Partner. It’s available for free from the  GitHub code repository and is designed to help IT pros to move their Azure subscriptions to different datacenter locations, either using the same subscription or a different one.