Office SP1 Arrives Earlier Than Vista SP1 And XP SP3

The Office team has surprised both Microsoft and the masses by coming out with Service Pack 1 of the hugely successful Office 2007, on 11 December 2007. The release is two months before schedule.

Office 2007 SP1 features security patches and bug fixes (including the mathematical error in Excel), but doesn’t have any new features. Apart from bug fixes, SP1 offers a number of performance enhancements, particularly for those running Windows Vista, where performance often lagged.

While the Office team has kept their testing period short, experts recommend that customers need to do some testing in their Enterprise environment before rolling it out, to see how it affects various custom applications. No official was available from Microsoft for comment. It seems SP1 is not an entirely new product release, but rather a wrap up of all product fixes to date, which brings performance, stability and security enhancements in one package. More than 500 of these fixes in SP1 were as a result of feedback that Microsoft had received through its online monitoring systems as a result of product crashes since the launch earlier this year.

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There are two key elements that have been added to the service pack, in addition to the patches and fixes. The first of these is support for Windows Server 2008, which is also scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2008, and secondly support for the ASP.Net AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology, that allows customers to build user interfaces like Web 2.0 on top of Microsoft SharePoint.

Doug Houger, Chief Operating Officer, Microsoft India states that the office team has worked overnight to make the SP1 more stable. It also includes previously released hotfixes that also help reduce the incidence of crashes in office applications.

“These enhancements span the software applications and servers that home and office workers use each day and will make the 2007 Office system, an even more robust and effective productivity tool. In essence, SP1 targets the issues that customers told us mattered to them most,” he concluded.