Get Ready to Download Office 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM This Summer

Microsoft is preparing to release the first upgrade for Office 2010. Service Pack 1 should be made available for download in the coming months according to the software giant.

A specific launch deadline wasn’t provided, but the promise is that customers running Office 2010 will be able to upgrade to SP1 RTM sometime in mid-summer 2011.

Of course, SP1 RTM will be offered not only for the Office 2010 productivity suite, but also for SharePoint Server 2010.

Microsoft has yet to share comprehensive details about what the first upgrade for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 will bring to the table, however this will change in the coming weeks.

The Redmond company plans to begin offering a variety of information on the changes that Service Pack 1 will introduce, which should be of interest to both end users, business customers and IT professionals.

“TechEd North America as a key venue where we will discuss SP1 at length, including the tentative release schedule. If you’re planning to attend, please be sure to stop into the session for details,” revealed a member of the Office Sustained Engineering team.

Details related to the language-version updates for Office 2010 SP1 RTM have already been offered to the public.

“SP1 will update all 40 SKU languages for Office, and update the SKU languages for SharePoint (with appropriate caveats noted in the SharePoint blog post),” the Office Sustained Engineering team added.

“In addition, 4 Language Interface Pack releases will also be updated: Galician, Basque, Catalan, Serbian Cyrillic. The time frames for releasing language versions of SP1 will be discussed in a future post.”

Since the launch of Office 2010 last year, the Redmond company provided customers with multiple Cumulative and Public updates for both Office and SharePoint.

Of course, all pre-SP1 refreshes for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 has been included in Service Pack 1.

SP1 “is a combination of Cumulative Updates and Public Updates,” the member of the Office Sustained Engineering team said. “SP1 will contain more fixes in each product. Between now and the time of release, we will publish more details about the coming changes.”