Careful Testing for Office XP SP3

Office XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) delivers many fixes for bugs and security vulnerabilities in the Office XP applications, including some virus protections that were developed for Office 2003 and then retrofitted to Office XP. However, SP3’s security fixes also introduce compatibility problems with add-ins and with Word mail merge.

Certain Office add-ins (such as Symantec’s Norton antispam add-in for Outlook) will not work properly after SP3 has been applied, and the security fixes introduce new warning messages that can interfere with Word mail merge. Neither of these problems was documented in the original “known issues” list for SP3, and even if a customer needs the former functionality, SP3 cannot be uninstalled.

Consequently, before deploying SP3 broadly, organizations should do the following:

• Read the resources listed below that document the problems with add-ins and mail merge
• Test SP3 with all add-ins they use and obtain new, compatible versions of add-ins from the vendors where