This holiday season Microsoft has been giving the gift that just keeps on giving, over and over again. Service packs! Today, Microsoft will release yet another: Office 2007 Service Pack 1. Darren Strange, a U.K. Microsoft Office product manager, blogged about Office 2007 SP1 this morning. I haven"t yet seen any other official information on the release, and I won"t. I"m sitting in the San Diego airport preparing to board a flight.
Based on Strange"s post and a Microsoft white paper, the company line is customer priority and the insinuation is that the service pack is being delivered early. Ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas! Bah humbug, I say. The new Office service pack, while not unwelcome, isn"t necessary. Office 2007 is highly stable, and it"s not like loads of enterprises are holding back deployments waiting for the update. The other service packs are piling up, and the question is, what right-minded IT organizations want to open these gifts—and test them—during the holidays? Windows Vista SP1 is available as a release candidate, with no numeral. Windows XP SP3 is RC1, which presumably means it"s further along. About two weeks ago, Microsoft released Exchange Server 2007 SP1.