Happy holidays, and it seems our gift to you this season is service packs...lots of service packs. If you are one of the people who have been waiting for Windows Vista Service Pack 1, you can now incorporate SP1 code into your testing, piloting, and deployment planning activity. The Release Candidate of Windows Vista SP1 is now available for download. We have also created a special site within TechNet, the Windows Vista Springboard, to aid you through the entire adoption process. Note that if you do take advantage of the pre-release code program, do remember that the code will likely change before its final release. In this case, we strongly recommend that you also plan to install the final version of Windows Vista SP1 when it is released in the first quarter of 2008.

For the 2007 Office Servers and Office suite, we've rolled the updates into a single service pack for servers and another one for the suite. Download the 2007 Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 1 and the 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 1 to get all of the updates released for the 2007 Microsoft Office System servers prior to December of 2007, plus important customer-requested stability and performance improvements and further enhancements to user security.

You can get a more complete description of the 2007 Office Servers SP1 and 2007 Office suite SP1, including a list of issues that were fixed, in the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles 936984: Description of the 2007 Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 1 and 936982: Description of the 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 1.

While Windows Vista and 2007 Office Servers are getting their first service pack updates, Windows XP is getting its last. For TechNet subscribers, Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. Windows XP SP3 will be a rollup that includes all previously released updates for Windows XP, including security updates, out-of-band releases, and hotfixes. It contains a small number of new updates, but should not significantly change the Windows XP experience.

Holiday break: This is your last TechNet Flash of 2007. The next newsletter is scheduled to hit your inbox on January 9, 2008. Have a great holiday and a happy New Year.

Thanks for reading,

Mitch Irsfeld
Editor, TechNet Flash