Microsoft: Office 2007 SP1 Going Automatic In June

Microsoft on Thursday gave notice to Office 2007 users that it plans to begin automatically distributing service pack 1 through Microsoft Update "starting around" June 16.

Automatic distribution of Office 2007 SP1 "will happen gradually" and not all users will see it at the same time, according to a blog post by unnamed members of the Office and Microsoft Update teams, who note that June 16th is the earliest possible starting date.

"This is necessary to ensure that our service infrastructure can meet the enormous demand for the service pack," the Office and Microsoft Update team members wrote .

Released last December, Office 2007 has had "tens of millions of downloads and "a very good reaction" from the marketplace, according to the blog post.

Office 2007 SP1 doesn't add a raft of new functions and features, but instead includes tweaks that improve the performance and stability of the software.

On the client side, Office 2007 SP1 fixes a number of bugs that have caused crashes in each of the major applications. On the server side, Microsoft has beefed up Sharepoint Server 2007's indexing and searching capabilities and added support for Ajax running in the Windows Server 2008 environment.

Michael Cocanower, president of Phoenix-based solution provider ITSynergy, installed Office SP1 several months ago and said it has been running smoothly.

"There haven't been any negative impacts from installing it, and I'm not concerned about alerting my customers that Office SP1 will soon being pushed out to their machines automatically," he said.