The first service pack for Office XP rolls up several previous patches and hotfixes and provides stability and performance improvements, particularly for Office XP running on Windows XP. Office XP Service Pack (SP)1 also includes some new features, but SP1's most remarkable feature may be its stability.

So far, most errors with SP1 reported on newsgroups are either failures to get the update to run on certain OEM versions of Office XP or e-mail-related errors for MSN Internet Access subscribers. This contrasts with the first service packs for Office 97 and Office 2000, which were followed by a confusing parade of re-releases, patches for the patches, and other updates.

Plain Text E-Mail Blocks Worms

Most notable among the new features in SP1 is a "plain text" option for the Outlook e-mail program. This option renders all incoming e-mail as unformatted text, reducing the likelihood of success for hacking exploits that send HTML e-mail containing script. Images and other related files appear as attachments to the plain text message.

SP1 also delivers a wizard for moving SharePoint Team Services (STS) intranet sites from one location to another. (STS is included with FrontPage 2002 and with the Developer Edition of Office XP; for background, see "Office XP Offers Collaboration, Discoverability" on page 16 of the June 2001 Update.)

Base for Future Updates

Microsoft says all future updates of Office XP will require that SP1 be installed first. Because SP1 will not be included in subsequent patches, customers may want to bypass the Web-based install process for the update and download a copy of the 18MB file. This will allow them to run the update locally in case they must reinstall Office or have trouble connecting to the Internet.

SP1 updates virtually every product in the Office family, and the single service pack will update retail, OEM, and volume licensing versions of Office, as well as individual programs, such as Word or FrontPage 2002, if they were purchased separately from the Office suite. Users who have previously upgraded the Office Web Components should uninstall them before applying SP1. After upgrading Office XP to SP1, they should download and install the latest versions of the Web components.

Availability and Resources

Participants in Microsoft’s Select volume licensing program, the Microsoft Developer Network, and TechNet will receive SP1 as part of their regularly scheduled mailings.

A starting point for SP1 is office.microsoft.com/downloads/2002/oxpsp1.aspx.

Information about ordering SP1 on CD, and the administrative download, which works only with volume-license versions of Office XP, is available at www.microsoft.com/office/ork/xp/journ/oxpsp1.htm.

A broad overview of SP1, including download and installation instructions and a list of the problems it fixes, is in Knowledge Base article Q307843, accessible at support.microsoft.com.

The latest versions of the Office Web Components are at office.microsoft.com/downloads/2002/owc10.aspx.