Redmond (WA) - Microsoft continues its practice to announce Office service packs that are scheduled to become available via Microsoft Update automatic distribution at least 30 days in advance. SP1 for Office 2007 has been released in December of last year and is now ready to be distributed via the company’s Automatic Update service.

According to a message posted on Microsoft’s "Office Sustained Engineering" blog, the company will begin distributing SP1 automatically via Automatic Update beginning June 16th. Microsoft plans to ramp the distribution gradually, which means that not all users will see the update right away. The company expects "enormous" demand, but noted that "10’s of millions of downloads" have been delivered since December 8, 2008 - the date the service pack was posted to the firm’s Office 2007 SP1 is a massive, 218.3 MB heavy patch collection that addresses a total of 441 issues (including those published prior to December of 2007) in the software suite, according to the update list. The most heavily patched applications are Outlook (103 patches), Excel (86), Office (62), Access (36) as well as Powerpoint and Word (26 each).

Details of the update are provided in the Knowledge Base article 942995.