It has taken Microsoft almost two months since the release to manufacturing of the second service pack for the Office 2007 System to make available fixes for an issue plaguing select server solutions in the suite. In all fairness, Microsoft came out in May 2009 and indicated that the installation of the 2007 Office servers Service Pack 2 catalyzed an erroneous product expiration date to be activated. The affected products according to the Redmond-based company are: Office SharePoint Server 2007, Project Server 2007, Form Server 2007, Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express.

Affected solutions “will expire 180 days after Service Pack 2 is deployed, as if it were a trial installation. The activation of the expiration date will not affect the regular function of these products until the expiration date passes, 180 days after Service Pack 2 is deployed. If the product expires, it will not affect data, configuration, or application code. However, it will make the Office Server product inaccessible for end-users,” Microsoft informed.

Two updates are already available for download from Microsoft, designed to resolve this specific issue. Affected consumers can grab either the 32-bit or the 64-bit flavor of the refresh, depending on the system they are running. Office 2007 SP2 RTM was offered on April 28, 2009. It wasn't until May 22, 2009 that the Redmond-based company acknowledged the problem and promised to deliver a fix. The software giant explained that there was also a manual fix possible for the issue.

“Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration. Click the Operations tab. Click Convert License Type. In the Enter the Product Key text box, type your product identification number, and then click OK. The License Synchronizer Job will run on all computers in the farm after a few moments. After all the computers have updated their license from the timer job, the Convert License Type page will reflect the correct license,” the company said.

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