Office 2007 Service Pack 2 Kiosk, with more staples

Read this first if you're looking for SP2 details: https://blogs.technet.com/gray_knowlton/archive/2009/04/27/office-2007-service-pack-2-kiosk.aspx

Office 2007 Service Pack 2 is getting quite a bit of attention, it is great to see. There has been world-wide traffic coming to my blog, and I’m sure that Doug’s, Tom Robertson’s, Sustaining Engineering, and other posts are getting lots of traffic as well. Offline today (and on Twitter) I’ve been dealing with a handful of common questions on SP2 that I thought I’d take a moment to answer.

Q: What if I was on the SP2 Beta? How do I uninstall that and add the release version of SP2?

A: First, you don’t have to. The Service Pack 2 installer should pave over the existing beta version of the SP without trouble. I say should, because I’m not on the testing team and am careful about making statements about testing that could be regarded as absolute. IF you wanted to do it the hard way (and for cleanliness purposes, I chose to do it this way), you can use the new Service Pack Uninstall tool to clean your machine. Here is how that looks when doing it from a DOS prompt. The tool is pretty simple to use. All of the packages you should see in the tool (at least as of today) should be for SP2 if you have them installed. Executing the remove command will uninstall the packages. Be sure to close your Office apps before you do this, and reboot after you are done. This is a handy tool. I’m hopeful that IT Pros will see this as a useful addition for managing add-in / update compatibility on various configurations of Office desktops.

Q: I saw a comment that “Office 2007 SP2 allows you to Open, Edit, and Save ODF, PDF and XPS.” Is that true?

A: This one is an important one to clarify:

- You can Open, Edit and Save documents using ODF 1.1 format.

- You can Save documents as PDF and XPS. This Service Pack release does not enable the editing or opening of PDF or XPS documents.

Q: If I am an IT Administrator, can I block users from downloading or installing SP2 before I have a chance to test it?

A: Yes, through Windows Server Update Services. (WSUS) is a free add-on for the Windows Server operating system to help network administrators manage updates for computers. By using WSUS with Active Directory® group policy, administrators can fully manage update settings and the distribution of updates for computers on their network. To find out more about using WSUS, go to the Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) Web site https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/wsus/default.aspx.

Q: Microsoft is saying that Outlook is more than 25% faster with SP2. Do you have data to support that? Where can I read that?

A: The Outlook team blog has a bit more detail than I shared in my post, and that data originates from a report from Principled Technologies. A highlight quote from the report: “we found Outlook 2007 SP2 was noticeably more responsive to user input and actions than the earlier version and took less time to perform the standard operations”

Q: Is this update only for Office client products? What about SharePoint? Is there an SP2 for SharePoint?

A: Yes, SharePoint and many other products have been updated. A SharePoint white paper describes in more depth what they have updated, and I have re-added the table pointing to the other Service Pack release details.

If there are other pressing FAQ's to handle, I'll update this post as we go forward.