MS Updates Office 2003

Microsoft released it's first major upgrade for Office 2003 today as Service Pack One (SP1) became available at OfficeUpdate.Com.

Among the upgrades available with the free download is improved spam filtering with Outlook e-mail, greater stability and reliability for Word, increased XML functions and improvements to Digital Rights Management. In addition their have been minor tweaks for One Note and Info Path based primarily on user feedback.

Jeanne Sheldon, Director of Office Management and Updating Services with Microsoft, told ZDNet.Com that the majority of improvements for Office 2003 will more than likely go unnoticed by users since for the most part they involve minor tweaks with the core elements of Word and Excel. "With the core applications, customers have become very accustomed to working with them in certain ways, and we don't want to make changes in an interim release that are disruptive for the customer" said Sheldon.

Speaking of things that might become disruptive to a customer such as having your browser hijacked, system compromised or having unwanted Active X controls run on your desktop, maybe Microsoft should get around to finally releasing Service Pack Two for Windows XP. After all what is the point of having a top notch office suite if some guy in an internet cafe in Barcelona can still take control of your system because XP has security holes that are so large you could host the running of the bulls in your home office.