"This affects only machines in a handful of enterprise customers' environments," said Tiffany Allesina, a group product manager at Microsoft in a statement provided by the company's public relations agency. Most customers that used the blocking tool have either installed SP2 or now use special tools for doing patch management, she said.
Microsoft has labeled SP2 a "critical" update and urges all Windows XP users to install it. Over 185 million copies of SP2 have been downloaded, according to Microsoft.
Adoption by enterprise customers is in line with Microsoft's expectations. In February, the company said 77 percent of about 800 enterprise customers surveyed in late 2004 planned to deploy SP2 sometime in mid-2005.
Holland & Knight LLP upgraded its 3,500 Windows XP clients to SP2 over a six week period without any hiccups. The company tested early releases of the service pack for several months, said Travis Abrams, IT security and systems manager at the international law firm.
The upgrade using Microsoft's SMS product was smooth, Abrams said. "The primary issues related to Web sites," he said. Some Web sites had to be added to the list of trusted sites in the Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser to work well, he said. IE in SP2 has a pop-up blocker, among other new features.
Business users need to test, but Microsoft can't be blamed if users are unpleasantly surprised by SP2, analysts have said. The software maker has provided several early releases of the service pack and a lot of documentation to help with the upgrade. Abrams at Holland & Knight advises his peers to upgrade as soon as possible, but to test compatibility with business applications and Web sites first. Guilinger at ReedSmith and Smith in Houston also caution users.
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