Office 2007 SP1 Out Early

By Greg McNevin

December 13, 2007: In a clean break from tradition, Microsoft has released the first service pack for Office 2007 earlier than expected.

Service Pack 1 (SP1) has hit the streets around a year after the suites initial release, and boasts several performance and stability improvements, not to mention full compatibility with the upcoming Windows Server 2008 update

While overshadowed somewhat by the impending release of Windows Vista’s first service pack, Office 2007 SP1 and its stability improvements in particular, are likely to please MS customers who have voiced concerns with the frequency of Office 2007 crashes.

“Crashes are one of the most frustrating experiences customers have, and the team worked hard with SP1 to make our products more stable. We've also included most of the previously-released hotfixes that also help reduce the incidence of crashes in Office applications,” said Microsoft Office product manager Reed Shaffner.

“We also did a lot of work to improve the reliability of the 2007 Office system’s server components with SP1. We know that search is really important to our enterprise customers using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, so we spent a lot of time improving indexing to help make documents and information easier to find.”

Shaffner adds that SP1 includes support for AJAX, and bolsters the suite’s security capabilities by incorporating the latest advances in protection from malware , privacy intrusions and other threats.

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