News
Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 SP3 Expected This Year
In an announcement by Microsoft today, both SharePoint 2007 and Office 2007 will be receiving Service Pack 3 by the end of the year. Microsoft also noted that SP3 will likely be the last update for both products.
A Thursday blog post from the Office Sustained Engineering and Release team said Microsoft expects to release SP3 "within Calendar Q4 2011," but later indicated it could be available as early as sometime this month: "The October 2011 release provides a 6-month window to test and deploy the release prior to exiting mainstream support."
In keeping with Microsoft's lifecycle support policy, Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 are both scheduled to lose "mainstream support" on April 2012, five years after their initial release. Mainstream support gives users access to free support as well as security and non-security updates.
After losing mainstream support, the products will enter an "extended support" period for another five years, ending April 2017. Products in extended support will continue to receive security updates, but non-security updates will require organizations to enter a paid contract with Microsoft.
"Service Pack 3 contains a roll-up of all 2007 Cumulative and Public Updates since Service Pack 2 for both Office client suites and applications as well as SharePoint Servers, in addition to some new fixes for issues discovered during the lifecycle of SP2," the blog said.
SP3 will follow Microsoft's standard procedure for releasing service packs, the blog said. It will initially be available as a manual download at the Microsoft Download Center and as an optional update via Microsoft Update. After 90 days, it will be delivered via Automatic Update.