Download Office 2007 Service Pack 3 (SP3) RTM in October 2011

Customers still running Office 2007 will receive a new upgrade for their version of the productivity suite sometime by the end of this month, according to Microsoft. 

The software giant was targeting the fourth quarter of 2011 for the release of Office 2007 Service Pack 3 (SP3), but it appears that the wait is nearly over, with a launch date set by the end of October 2011. A specific availability deadline was not shared with the public at this point in time. 

As usual, the new service pack covers both Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007, and of course, users will get to upgrade all components of the two products. 

Most likely, SP3 will also be the final upgrade for Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007, with the Redmond company not planning any new service packs. 

“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 company said. 

“For those of you hoping to test SP3 prior to its deployment, we will continue or standard practice with Service Pack releases. Initially SP3 will be offered through the Microsoft Download Center as a manual download, through Microsoft Update as an Optional update. No earlier than 90 days after release, we will convert SP3 to an Automatic Update for our 2007 customers.”

Users should by no means expect a major upgrade from Office 2007 SP3, as this is nothing more than a standard service pack, as far as Microsoft is concerned. 

In fact, the company has highlighted no new features that customers could look forward to, indicating that SP3 is designed to bring all existing updates together in a single package, rather than anything else. 

“Service Pack 3 contains a roll-up of all 2007 Cumulative and Public Updates since Service Pack 2 for both Office client suites and applications as well as SharePoint Servers, in addition to some new fixes for issues discovered during the lifecycle of SP2,” the software giant said. 

“For each of these products, if you are current with Automatic Updates for Office 2007, you have already installed most of the changes in the release. SP3 is much smaller than 2007 SP1, SP2 or the recently released 2010 SP1.”

Microsoft is also advising customers to consider making the jump to Office 2010, and ensure that they’ll enjoy mainstream support until at least 2015.

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