Microsoft Office 2007 Update Due

Microsoft Corp. announced Thursday that it will start pushing Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) to customers this month.

In an entry to the Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) blog, Cecilia Cole, a Microsoft program manager, said that the service pack would be posted to the update service in April. She did not name an exact date, but said that more information would be published on an Office-specific blog "later this month."

When Microsoft releases updates for WSUS users -- who are almost exclusively enterprises that feed their systems patches from their own servers -- it also makes those same updates available on Microsoft Update, the similar service for consumers and small businesses. Microsoft Update, a superset of the better-known Windows Update, provides patches for Windows and some of its other software, notably Office.

Microsoft first talked up Office 2007 SP2 nearly six months ago, when it said it would ship the update between February and April 2009.

Office 2007 SP2 includes support for Open Document Format (ODF), the document format used by the open-source OpenOffice.org; boosts the performance of the Outlook 2007 e-mail client; adds the ability to uninstall service packs; and contains all the bug fixes and security patches released since Microsoft rolled out SP1 in December 2007.

Microsoft did not issue a service pack blocking tool for Office 2007 SP1, and apparently will not for SP2 either; searches on the Microsoft site failed to dig up any mention of a blocker. It has crafted toolkits to block other updates, however, including one to keep the new Internet Explorer 8 from reaching PCs.

Office 2007 debuted at retail in January 2007, concurrent with the launch of Windows Vista.