Introduction

Welcome to the Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering team blog! We’re the team behind Office hotfixes, security updates, and service packs. We’ll use this blog to talk about the updates we release. Some of the things we’ll cover:

· Announcements of released and upcoming updates

· Deployment guidance – how to distribute and install the updates

· Explanations of complex or confusing scenarios, problems, and known issues

· General information about how Office updates work

· Responses to your comments

· Anything else we think you’ll find interesting and useful

While we’ll discuss security updates after they’re released, we won’t go into depth about the security aspects – that discussion can be found on other sites such as the Microsoft Security Response Center, Secure Windows Initiative, and David LeBlanc’s blogs. We’ll focus on deployment and Office functionality.

The articles will be written for a relatively technical audience: IT professionals, consultants, enterprise users, power users – in other words, those with a relatively high degree of expertise in updating and deploying. If that’s not you, you may find some of our posts to be hard to understand. But stick around and you‘ll start to pick it up. And if you are one of these power users, you’ll find lots of useful information here. We plan to post about once or twice per month, but that may vary depending on what’s going on.

Some ground rules:

· This isn’t a support forum. We aren’t support personnel and don’t have the expertise to answer support questions, so we won’t try – we don’t want to lead you astray. Instead, visit Microsoft Support or contact the appropriate support resource, which may be your computer manufacturer. We are program managers, testers, and developers, and we’ll speak only to what we know.

· We can’t answer every comment. We promise to read all of them, but there just isn’t time to respond to each individual comment or question. That said, we plan to use comments as a source for future posts, so don’t hold back!

· Comments are moderated. This is mostly intended to prevent spam, but unproductive flamewars may be cut off too – we want the comments section of the blog to remain useful for our readers and ourselves. We promise to use a light hand when moderating, and we certainly want to hear your constructive criticism – it helps us improve.

· We won’t discuss confidential information. ‘Nuff said.

Thanks for tuning in, and see you soon!