Centralizing updates for Office and related products

Jan 11, 2010 11:52 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has launched a new resource on TechNet designed to make it easier for customers of its Office, Office Server and related products to manage the minor updates, as well as major upgrades offered by the company. Office users now have a single location to keep track of, easily find and administer updates for products associated with the Office productivity suite. The Redmond company is advising customers to use a combination of the new Update Center and Microsoft Update in order to ensure that their Office deployments are up to date.

“The Office Sustaining Engineering team is happy to announce a new website that allows you to track all updates released by Office in a single place,” revealed a member of the Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering team. “This Update Center provides you with a list of the most recent Service Pack, Security Update, and Cumulative Update (Hotfix) releases for each supported version of Office, as well as a list of updates that have been released over the past year. Additionally, we’ve provided an RSS feed that you can use to receive notifications whenever a new update becomes available.”

On the Update Center, customers will be able to find and access updates released for a variety of supported versions of Office suites and Office desktop programs. However, Microsoft is also centralizing refreshes offered for Office servers, including SharePoint Server, Forms Server, Groove Server, PerformancePoint Server, Project Portfolio Server, and Project Server. At the same time, Update Center also offers updates for Search Server and Windows SharePoint Services, the software giant informed.

“In the future, we’ll stop using [the Office Sustained Engineering blog] to detail all of the updates that have been released, but rather will post brief notifications that direct users to the information on the Update Center,” the Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering team member added. “Please share your thoughts on the new site using the ‘Click to Rate and Give Feedback’ section at the top of the Update Center itself. This is our first attempt at creating such a site, so we’d love to hear what you think and will do our best to incorporate your comments.”