SharePoint/Office 2007 Service Pack 3 coming Q4 2011

SharePoint/Office 2007 Service Pack 3 coming Q4 2011

The Office Sustained Engineering Team has announced that Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Office 2007 & SharePoint 2007 will be coming some time during 2011 Q4.  This appears to be the last major update to the 2007 client & server stack as the team states:

“We are offering this release in preparation for the April 2012 end of mainstream support for the 2007 client and server products. The October 2011 release provides a 6-month window to test and deploy the release prior to exiting mainstream support.”

The Service Pack will be a roll-up of all prior 2007 Cumulative and Public updates since Service Pack 2 plus some new hotfixes.  As always with the SharePoint 2007 world, you will need to install the WSS update before the MOSS update.  There is not a planned or expected CU requirement following the SP3 installation. 

To quote the article directly:

“SP3 will include changes in the following areas:

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”

Soapbox time!!!!

upgrades

As always, please plan to test your upgrade plan in your Development/Test/QA environment prior to ever consider installing in Production. 

Keep in mind that if you only have a Production environment, you really only have a testing environment.  Now is a good time to start updating your resume if you haven’t and you are even thinking about heading down an upgrade path. 

Consider spending as little as $50 a month with a company like CloudShare to get a testing environment.  They have a great pre-production hosting option that will allow you to validate your scenarios without having to invest a ton of capital to do it.

NOTE: Best Practices for installing SharePoint 2010 Service Packs and updates changed as of August 31, 2011 according to the Update for SharePoint 2010 Products page

“As a result of the new packaging, it is no longer necessary to install the SharePoint Foundation cumulative update and then install the SharePoint Server cumulative update.”

Keep an eye on this, the story has now changed and then changed back since RTM.

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