Office 2007 Line Gets SP1

First service packs have shipped for the 2007 versions of the Office suite and its components, as well as Groove Server, the Project clients and server, the SharePoint products, and Visio. These service packs deliver important security, reliability, and performance fixes for the products, along with some new features for SharePoint site administration and programming.

Client Service Packs Tackle Security

On the client, the first service packs for Office 2007, Project 2007 (Standard and Professional), and Visio 2007 fix a variety of bugs, notably a much-discussed Excel bug that displays incorrect results for some calculations, and Outlook 2007 performance problems with mail store files (PSTs). The service packs also close security holes, including some that have enabled remote execution of code by attackers.

These service packs will be the first that organizations roll out using the new installation technology delivered in the 2007 Office System clients, so organizations will need to review the procedures for deploying service packs with this new technology. Among other things, the new technology simplifies the process of “slipstreaming” a service pack into an existing administrative installation point so that subsequent installs from an installation point will include the service pack. Separate Language Pack SP1 releases support organizations that have deployed the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) packs for the clients. The service packs cannot be uninstalled.