Announcing the Release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2!
The Outlook team is very pleased to announce the official release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2, the culmination of months of hard work to bring our users performance and reliability improvements which have been tested and shown to significantly improve the speed and responsiveness of Outlook! This Service Pack is the result of a large and directed effort to make your Outlook 2007 experience great and we think that you will be pleasantly surprised.
The Outlook team targeted your most common daily workflows and made them faster and more dependable. Significant improvements were also made in the areas of launching, synchronizing and reliably searching with Outlook 2007. Users with small to average size mailboxes will see a 26% performance increase and users with large mailboxes will see a 35% performance increase in the following areas:
- Faster startup and more reliable shutdown
- Faster folder switching between folders with a large number of messages
- Better overall responsiveness when performing common tasks
For more detailed information on Service Pack 2 performance benchmarking read the following report from Principled Technologies, an independent 3rd party performance analysis company. The report includes detailed test results on different hardware types and with both small and large mailboxes, so it will give you an idea of how much faster Outlook will perform based on your environment.
We previously blogged about the February Cumulative Update which was a large collection of fixes designed to quickly address problems that were preventing Outlook 2007 deployments. Service Pack 2 is a collection of those fixes and more that has been thoroughly tested and all Office 2007 users should feel confident installing it on their machines. To experience these improvements install the service pack today and let us know how much faster and better Outlook is for you!
For more information about Outlook SP2 improvements see the whitepaper here.
You can use Microsoft Update to install Office 2007 Service Pack 2 by clicking here and then choosing “Check for updates” in the left-hand column.
Note: Upon successful installation of the update, the first time Outlook is run there will be a one-time delay as Outlook optimizes your data files as shown by a progress dialog (pictured below). After this initial process, performance will be improved. If you have already installed the February Cumulative Update Outlook will not need to repeat this optimization, so you will not see this one-time delay on startup.
The Outlook Team
