WSUS and Office 2007 news

Hey WSUS Admins -

Happy New Year!! Hope you all had great holidays and good times with friends and family throughout!! As many of you experienced, or probably saw on the news, Seattle was an absolute weather war-zone right before Christmas , with record breaking rains and winds. After November's rains our Seattle "terra firma" became jello - so all we needed was a great big windstorm to bring our trees down. And down they came and i mean alot of them!! What a weather year for the northwest .....we're all just waiting for the firestorms and locust next!! Oh well, didnt ruin many holidays and we all needed to get in touch with our "pre-power roots" - so I guess it was all good. 

On the WSUS related news-front I have some info on Office 2007 and WSUS 3.0. Office 2007 will definately be added to the WSUS catalog in time for their first update, sometime in the next month or so. Now as far as the compatibility pack being available via WSUS, thats a bit more complicated. Heres' the official word from Office on that one. 

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats was not engineered to be deployed to Microsoft Update and WSUS. The Pack, as designed, needs to target a language-specific version of Office XP/2003, and due to the possible MUI combinations available within an enterprise, there is no way to automatically identify the user’s preferred language. In addition, installing multiple language-specific versions of the Pack on the same machine is not supported. Therefore, we are requiring customers to select their preferred language when downloading the Pack from the Download Center.

thanks -

Bobbie