Author: Dave December 11, 2007

I guess you can figure out where I get most of my news from. ZDNet posted this today:

First Office 2007, SharePoint 2007 service packs ready for download by ZDNet‘s Mary Jo Foley — Microsoft has released the first service pack (SPs) for Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 — a calendar quarter ahead of schedule. So what’s coming in the first Office System 2007 SP update and how is it being rolled out? Read on.

Quick, run, go! Get it before something bad happens. Mary Jo Foley wrote on ZDNet that

There don’t seem to be any huge, show-stopper bugs that Microsoft is addressing in either of the new service packs.

but this is likely because if they did fix any gaping holes, there would leave less for them to do in the future. For a while, it’s been widely believed that Microsoft patched any existing holes by cramming the QuickTime player into them and holding the patch together with gum and popsicle sticks.

Who knows what magic MS really spins in their workshops? But I did grab this update right away, in fact it’s still installing. I can probably get a few more blog posts out before it’s through and I have to reboot. Yup, this is a juicey one.

These patches are a little late, but better late than never. The biggest benefactor is Excel according to Mary Jo’s article, she has Rob Helm of Microsoft quoted as saying this of the Excel fix:

‘When inputting calculations that should result in numbers 65,534 through 65,536, Office Excel 2007 no longer returns the display error of 100,001.’ That was an embarassing problem and a real confidence-sapper in all the financial firms that use Excel for business-critical models.”

Quite embarrassing, I agree. A bigger sapper than that is when Office 2007 just croaks on you in the middle of your work, as it did to me several times, but it appears they addressed “the five bugs” that cause that.

What I’m most impressed about in that article is the use of terminology by the Microsoft people. Such phrases as “lots of customer pain points,” and “incremental advances”. I need to read the books they read because I love these! Customer says, “hey your program keeps crashing on me, and it’s really getting on my pain points”. Answer: “Hey, I’m making advancements….incrementally”. Beautiful!

So as I predicted, my updates are STILL installing. I will go and take a nap and when they’re done, if new crashes happen, rest assured that I’ll post about it.