Testing A New Definition Update Publishing Process for Windows Defender

Hi Folks,

Adam here from the antimalware team. I wanted to give you a heads-up that we will be testing a new definition update process in the next two weeks. Definition updates for Windows Defender (Windows Vista and current platforms) will be publishing daily (Monday-Friday) starting from August 1st and will continue for 2 weeks until August 15th, 2006. We are testing a new end-to-end definition update release pipeline that will allow us to publish definition updates at a higher frequency and we would like to get a better understanding of issues that may arise due to this higher frequency update process. At the end of this period, Windows Defender updates will return to our normal twice weekly schedule.

We have been working the last few months so that our new signature release process will be able to publish updates much more frequently and on a flexible schedule. As the next step, we will start releasing Windows Defender updates every day (Monday to Friday) within a trial period for the next two weeks ending August 15th, 2006. Again, we will return to a twice weekly release schedule after August 15th, but with this new process will be able to release updates on a more flexible schedule at any day including weekends and holidays for emergency situations. We want to understand how well the new process satisfies a daily release cycle, and receive customer feedback during this trial period, so please post your definition update experience to our newsgroups.

We hope that this test of our new process shows the progress that we’re making towards providing better and more timely protection for our customers as we head towards our final release.

Thanks,

Adam