From July up until mid August, Microsoft has been celebrating the service pack. Starting last month, the Redmond company debuted the pre-beta testing phase for private releases of refreshes designed for its flagship products. First came Windows Vista Service Pack 1 followed closely by Windows XP Service Pack 3. This time around it’s the turn of the Office 2007 System. A technical Preview of the first service pack for Office 2007 shipped to a select group of testers on August 15. Microsoft applied the same strategy with the Office 21007 SP1 release, as it did with the pre-beta version of Vista SP1 and XP SP3, revealing absolutely no details about the service pack.

Still, information was leaked that the Technology Adoption Program members were the recipients of the Office 2007 SP1 Technical Preview, and that is not all that leaked. A couple of days after the initial release, Office 2007 SP1 was leaked to peer-top-peer file sharing networks, and is available for download via torrent trackers. Microsoft continues to not issue any official comment in relation to Office 2007 SP1. To make matters worse, although the Redmond company did confirm an estimative launch date for Windows Seven, the successor of Windows Vista, currently planned for 2010, Office 14, the upcoming version of the Office system, designed to replace Office 2007, is only believed to be made available in 2009.

But while Microsoft is muting all details on the product, independent sources are less eager to jump on board the company's Windows Omerta codename Translucency. According to an anonymous commenter, Office 2007 SP1 includes: "Better support for VSTO ver 3; more complete Object Model documentation for coding; better support for .NET ver 3.5; improvements to animated text rendering (Think PowerPoint); corection of some compatibility issues with earlier versions of Office; minor changes in using DirectX. (Video overlay) and the ususal minor collection of this and that."

The full build tag is 12.0.6207.1000 (MSO 12.0.6206.1000) and the service pack is provided as an .EXE file weighing in at 214MB, just like Windows XP SP3, although for Vista Microsoft went another way, delivering the whole operating system with the refresh installed as a 3+GB ISO file.