Guy Barrette, Microsoft, Regional Director, Montreal, Canada, Visual Studio, .NET Expertise Office 2007 SP2 now available - Guy Barrette

Guy Barrette

Microsoft Regional Director, Montreal, Canada

Office 2007 SP2 now available

The Office 2007 SP2 is now available.  If you’ve been dissatisfied with Outlook performance and behaviour, this service pack should solve many of these problems.

Taken from KB article 953195 describing the changes:

Microsoft Office Outlook
  • Performance improvements that apply to the following general responsiveness areas:
    • Startup
      Removes lengthy operations from initial startup.
    • Shutdown
      Makes Outlook exit predictably despite pending activities.
    • Folder View and Switch
      Improves view rendering and folder switching.
  • Calendar improvements
    Improves underlying data structures and the general reliability of calendar updates.
  • Data file checks
    Greatly reduces the number of scenarios in which you receive the following error message when you start Outlook:

    The data file 'file name' was not closed properly. This file is being checked for problems.

  • Search reliability
    Improves search reliability when you use SP2 with Windows Desktop Search 4 (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/choose/windowssearch4.mspx) .
  • Improvements to Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
    There are now fewer duplicated items.
  • Object Model improvements
    Now contains many customer-driven fixes.
For more information about these improvements and details about other Outlook fixes, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
968774 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968774/ ) Outlook 2007 improvements in the 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 2

The recommended update process is thru Windows Update but you can download the SP directly:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b444bf18-79ea-46c6-8a81-9db49b4ab6e5&displaylang=en

Office2007SP2

List of all the SP2 downloads:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968170

Press release:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Apr09/04-28Office2007SP2QA.mspx

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Posted: Apr 29 2009, 08:17 AM by guybarrette | with 2 comment(s)
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Comments

David Taylor said:

Guy,

It is crashing for me intermittently when I close outlook now since I applied SP2, which is frustrating.  Only crashing when I close which is not too bad.

Only extra thing I have installed in the latest Microsoft Outlook Connector for Hotmail - so maybe that needs updating or something?

# April 29, 2009 8:54 AM

guybarrette said:

Many Outlook problems are related to 3rd party add-ins.  Try disabling any add-ins that you are not using:

weblogs.asp.net/.../outlook-high-cpu-usage-solved.aspx

# April 29, 2009 9:41 AM

David Taylor said:

Thanks Guy,

I checked your blog entry and the trust center.  The only addin is the Outlook Connector.  I tend to run my systems really clean with almost nothing other than Visual Studio, Office and Vista.

You can be reasonably sure Microsoft did sufficient testing with no plugins. So it is almost certainly the outlook connector which is serviced via Microsoft Update - so hopefully another update will come out soon.

If I hade to guess:  Microsoft seems to shut down Outlook quicker with SP2 so probably only give plugins 1-2 seconds before killing them, thus causing the problem.

I might be seeing the problem either because I have a large 500 MB hotmail account needing syncing - or because I do not live in redmond/USA.

You would not believe the number of problems Microsoft do not seem to pick up caused by latency for users a long way from their US servers (ie when syncing between Australia and US Hotmail servers).  I have requested to many many product managers they insert a few seconds of network latency when building/testing their products to simulate the experience of users in other countries...but is always goes ignored.

Anyway..I can live with it crashing 20% of the time when I close Outlook provided it does not corrupt the pst files.  I am not going to roll back to SP1.

Dave

# April 29, 2009 10:17 AM