Some customers running Office 2007 products should postpone the deployment of the second service pack for the productivity suite, unless they want to put their solutions on a path to expiration. An unfixed bug managed to make its way into the release to manufacturing build of Office 2007 SP2 and, in case the service pack is applied to select products, the expiration deadline is activated erroneously. Microsoft informed that installing SP2 on top of Office SharePoint Server 2007, Project Server 2007, Form Server 2007, Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express would put the solutions on the path to expiration. The company mentioned that Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 was not affected by the bug in SP2.

“This means SharePoint will expire as though it was a trial installation 180 days after SP2 is deployed. The activation of the expiration date will not affect the normal function of SharePoint up until the expiration date passes. Furthermore, product expiration 180 days after SP2 installation will not affect customer’s data, configuration or application code but will render SharePoint inaccessible for end-users,” revealed Jeff Teper, corporate vice president, SharePoint..

The Redmond company has explained that it is currently working on an update designed to automate fixing the problem. For the time being, affected customers can turn to a manual workaround that will remove the improper product expiration date introduced by SP2. “To work around this issue customers will need to re-enter their Product ID numbers (PID) on the Convert License Type page in Central Administration. Please see this KB article for detailed steps. (The KB link is not currently active, it will be available within the next 48hrs),” Teper added.

The expiration date is set to 180 days from the installation of Office 2007 SP2 RTM. This offers Microsoft plenty of time to resolve the problem. Still, the software giant is bound to issue an update as soon as possible. “The issue only activates the product expiration date. The activation of the expiration date does not affect the normal function of SharePoint up until the expiration date passes, at which point SharePoint will be inaccessible for end-users. This issue does not affect customer’s data, configuration or application code,” Teper said.

Download Office 2007 Service Pack 2 from Softpedia by clicking here.