Microsoft announced on Thursday that it plans to distribute the third and final service pack for Office 2007 shortly.
The software giant revealed it is planning to release Office 2007 Service Pack 3 (SP3) within calendar Q4, 2011. Microsoft is offering the update to Office 2007 users as part of its preparation for the April 2012 end of mainstream support for Office 2007. “The October 2011 release provides a 6-month window to test and deploy the release prior to exiting mainstream support,” said Microsoft’s Office Sustained Engineering Team in a blog post on Thursday.
Microsoft refused to provide an exact date for the release but the wording of the blog post appears to indicate that the service pack will be made available in October. “As we approach the date we will have more to share on exact timing,” said Microsoft. The company will distribute the update initially through the Microsoft Download Center as a manual download and through Microsoft Update as an optional update. Microsoft plans to convert SP3 to an automatic update after 90 days for all Office 2007 users.
Service Pack 3 contains a roll-up of all 2007 Cumulative and Public Updates since Service Pack 2. Microsoft says it plans to include additional fixes for issues discovered during the life cycle of Office 2007 Service Pack 2. SP3 will include changes for the following products:
- 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