News

Tech-Ed: SP1 of Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 Coming June

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• May 16, 2011

Microsoft will release the first service pack (SP1) for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 by the end of June, the company announced today at the Tech-Ed 2011 conference, which kicked off in Atlanta.

SP1 of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 will be the first major update to both products, which Microsoft released a year ago. Microsoft indicated last month that SP1 would be coming by mid-summer and that an announcement was pending at Tech-Ed.

Microsoft will offer SP1 as a manual update and it will become an automatic update 90 days after its release, Microsoft said in a blog post. The company said all language versions of SP1 will be released simultaneously.

The release of SP1 comes as Microsoft's Office 365 is in widespread beta. The updates will impact those who subscribe to plans that include the Microsoft Office Professional Plus package, which consists of Office 2010 Professional.

According to the blog post, among the new features in SP1 are:

• A fix to the "Snooze Time" in Outlook so that it can reset between appointments,
• Improved backup and restore functionality for SharePoint Server,
• Word Web Application that extends printing support to "Edit Mode,"
• Project Professional that now synchronizes scheduled tasks with SharePoint task lists,
• Native Internet Explorer 9 support for Office Web Applications and SharePoint,
• Support for Google's Chrome browser in Office Web Applications, and
• The ability to insert charts into Excel Workbooks using Excel Web Application.

Microsoft said Office 2010 is the fastest-selling version of the product ever. For the most recent quarter, it posted 21 percent growth on $5.25 billion in sales.