14 DAY TRIAL // Starting in mid July and continuing in August, Microsoft made available releases of the service packs planned for all its major cash cows. Pre-beta versions of the refreshes associated with Windows Vista, Windows XP and the Office 2007 system have been dropped to select testers in the past month. Subsequently, information related to the releases leaked out, as the products were no longer exclusively available inhouse over at the Redmond campus, and under Sinofsky's strict and disciplined Windows Omerta codenamed Translucency. And the actual pre-beta versions soon followed, for all service packs, with no exception.
Steven Sinofsky, now Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, brought with him from the Office division not only the death of codenames and the era of product numbers but also a leak extravaganza. The latest Microsoft testing product to become available via BitTorrent, the popular peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol, is of course the Technology Preview of the first service pack for the Office 2007 System. In this manner, Office 2007 SP1 Technical Preview joined the pre-beta build of Vista SP1 and XP SP3 on Torrent trackers.
As of August 17, Office 2007 SP1 became available via P2P networks. The downloads point to version 12.0.6207.1000, and the build number has been confirmed to be the Technical Preview of Office 2007 SP1. One of the marketing slogans with which Microsoft celebrated that simultaneous launch of Windows Vista and the Office 2007 System was "Better Together". Obviously, it also applies to torrent trackers.
But Office 2007 SP1 was preceded on peer-to-peer networks by Vista SP1 and XP SP3, and by the information leaked about the service packs for the two editions of the Windows operating system. It is not a coincidence that Microsoft has debuted the testing for XP SP3, Vista SP1 and Office 2007 SP1 almost simultaneously. This aspect points to a potential company strategy to also make the final versions of the refreshes available in conjunction. Microsoft is yet to confirm a final release date, but speculation reveals that the service packs could be dropped either by the end of 2007 or in early 2008.