Premier Support Completes Transition to Unified Support

• Customers still using Microsoft Premier Support have a limited time to convert to the Unified Support offering.
• Changes to Unified Support make the conversion less costly.
• Most customers will see higher overall support costs and may want to look for alternatives.

Premier Support, Microsoft’s long-running enterprise support offering, is no longer available for commercial customers. It is replaced with Unified Support, which offers unlimited break-fix support and access to an online portal for a fixed cost. Unified Support is priced as a percentage of a customer’s total Microsoft licensing spend. In most cases, Unified Support increases an organization’s support costs compared to Premier, although some recent changes reduce but do not eliminate the cost increases.

Unified Background

Unified Support offers three levels of paid support. All levels include unlimited problem-resolution services through a set group of customer contacts for Microsoft enterprise products and services, and a resource center called the Services Hub. The levels are differentiated by the available catalog of add-on services, the level of account management a customer can access, and the phone support response time targets.