Microsoft will stop issuing detailed security bulletins next month. For the past 20 years, these bulletins have provided users and IT professionals with information about vulnerabilities and their patches.

Microsoft announced in November that the last bulletin would be posted with January's Patch Tuesday (the monthly round of security updates) and that the new process would start on February 14, next month's patch day.

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What are security bulletins?

The web-based bulletins are a feature of Microsoft's patch disclosure policies that have been around 1998. 

What is going to replace the bulletins?

A searchable database that has been made available for preview since November on "Security Updates Guide" by Microsoft containing support documents. The documents are specific to a vulnerability on a Windows edition, or a version of another Microsoft product. They can be sorted and filtered by various criteria including the affected software, the patch's release date, its CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) identifier, and the numerical label of the KB (Knowledge Base) support document.

The move is a result of Microsoft customers asking for better access to update information, as well as easier ways to customize their view to serve a diverse set of needs.

However, according to Chris Goettl, product manager with patch management vendor Shavlik, the change had become a necessity once Microsoft upended Windows patching practices with the mid-2015 launch of Windows 10. With this, Goettl is referring to the radical patching practice Microsoft introduced with Windows 10, where security updates of a month are collected into a single download-and-install package unlike, earlier, when individual patches could be withheld.