Microsoft plans to release a third Service Pack update for Office 2007, before official support for Microsoft Office 2007 ends in April 2012. Microsoft is supposedly referring to Service Pack 3 as being an October 2011 release, according to ZDNet. As has been the case with previous Service Packs for Microsoft Office, the update will be available from Microsoft Download Center as a manual download option, and also on Windows Update as an optional update. After 90 days it will become an automatic update for Office 2007 using customers.
Microsoft is advising Windows using customers who are using Office 2003 or earlier to go to Office 2010, as opposed to Office 2007. Office 2010 will be supplied with free mainstream support directly from Microsoft until 2015, at which point a newer version of the Office software will have been released. Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 was released in April 2009, so the gap between is just over two years.
Microsoft employees are saying that Service Pack 3 is a roll up of all 2007 Cumulative and Public updates made since Service Pack 2 released. It will be available for Office client suites and applications, as well as SharePoint Servers. Some new fixes will also be bundled, after being discovered during the Service Pack 2 lifecycle. This information came from the Microsoft Office updates blog, dated October 6th. A direct quote of the information on SP3 follows:
SP3 is much smaller than 2007 SP1, SP2 or the recently released 2010 SP1. We will provide documentation detailing the changes and the affected packages on TechNet,” company officials said. And unlike the case with Office 2010 SP1, customers won’t be asked to deploy the accompanying Cumulative Update at the same time as the coming SP3.
SP3 will include changes in the following areas:
- Office Client 2007 Suites
- Office SharePoint 2007 Servers
- Office SharePoint Search Server 2007
- Office SharePoint Designer 2007
- Office Project 2007
- Office Visio 2007
- Office Proofing tools 2007
- Calendar Printing Assistant for Outlook 2007
- Office InterConnect 2007
- Office Compatibility Pack
- PowerPoint Viewer
- Visio Viewer
- Office Servers Language Pack
- Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
- Office Access Runtime and Data Connectivity Components