MS OFFICE NEWS: Microsoft to Office Users: Upgrade to New Service Packs Now

Microsoft cites its loss in a patent-infringement case as the reason behind its sudden upgrade push for Office 2003 and Office XP Professional products. Microsoft is pushing customers to upgrade to the latest service packs for Office, but not for the usual security and performance reasons. Ten days ago, Microsoft began notifying its volume-license customers that they should upgrade to the latest service packs for Office in order to comply with a patent-ruling against Microsoft.

"It was recently decided in a court of law that certain portions of code found in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, Microsoft Office Access 2003, Microsoft Office XP Professional and Microsoft Access 2002 infringe a third-party patent. As a result, Microsoft must make available a revised version of these products with the allegedly infringing code replaced," according to the note.

Full story: Microsoft Watch

Ha ! Copyright considerations bite Bill's behind for a change !

Is M$ gonna come & fix everything?; when my users start moaning, "well I installed sp 'whatever' & now my programs broke .." - somehow I think not.

Is this a new SP going to be released? We run mainly office 2000, but we have a handful of liceneses of Office XP and Office 2003 and they are all up to date with Service packs.

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Originally Posted by confus-ed

Is M$ gonna come & fix everything?; when my users start moaning, "well I installed sp 'whatever' & now my programs broke .." - somehow I think not.

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Have you had many issues when applying service packs? I guess I have been lucky because the few problems I have had were fixed by removing the software and reinstalling it and then applying the service pack right away. Of course we re-image our machines annually at the very least (exept the student use computers because kids are always screwing with them. We image those at least monthly) to keep them fresh. Our users have a tendancy to download and install crap software like browser toolbars and stuff that has ad-ware/spyware.

I dont recall the name atm, but its a software that restores everything as it was after every reboot, so anything installed is gone. We have it at University.

And with a good amount of user account settings, you can prevent crapware from being installed, well try and prevent it ;)

There used to be a PCI card that did that as well.

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Originally Posted by TechZ

I dont recall the name atm, but its a software that restores everything as it was after every reboot, so anything installed is gone. We have it at University.

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Software like that has its upsides and downsides I guess.

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Originally Posted by TechZ

And with a good amount of user account settings, you can prevent crapware from being installed, well try and prevent it ;)

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Hopefully when we move away from Novell and start using Microsoft AD we can stop some more of that. Right now we use Novell Zenworks to control policies but we have many users that are on policy free machines. I guess I could go to each machine individually and set restrictions, but that is a pain in the a$$.

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Originally Posted by TechZ

I dont recall the name atm, but its a software that restores everything as it was after every reboot, so anything installed is gone. We have it at University.

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DeepFreeze is what I use here at the high school. It's not so much that it restores the machine, but write protects the HDD.