In a move that won't surprise Office 2010 followers, in the past few hours Microsoft released Office 2010 Service Pack 2, widely anticipated to be the last service pack for the three-year-old workhorse. Office 2010 SP2 arrives along with companion patches to SharePoint and OWA. It's available on the TechNet and MSDN sites, as well as the Download Center, and it should start showing up momentarily in Microsoft Update -- although it isn't yet designated/checked for automatic updates.
My advice is to hold off, as with all Service Packs, but chances are very good this one will be quite clean. Microsoft started beta testing it in January and opened up the SP2 beta to public testing in early April. Reports of problems have been few and far between. If you've been keeping up on updates to Office 2010 -- particularly through March of this year -- there's no pressing need to install SP2.
Microsoft's official announcement on the Office Sustained Engineering TechNet blog, dated July 16 (but available only in the past few hours) describes the improvements in SP2:
The SP2 release improves the compatibility of the Office and SharePoint 2010 products with Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10, Office 2013, and SharePoint 2013. It also addresses security, stability, and performance and contains all the Cumulative Updates (CU) and Public Updates (PU) that have released since SP1, starting with the June 2011 CU and July 2011 PU and ending with the April 2013 CU and May 2013 PU. The issues fixed specifically in the service pack are listed in the SP2 changes list.
Knowledge Base article 2687455 gives an overview of the changes and points to the download sites for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. That's the easiest way to get common download links, if you don't want to use Microsoft Update.
Known issues are listed in KB 2687520. In particular, there's a known problem when you install the patch on a computer that's running Server 2003 SP2. In addition, check that KB article if you're going to install the SharePoint patch on a machine running Server 2008 R2 or Server 2012.
Microsoft anticipates that SP2 will turn into an automatic update in 90 days.
My hat's off to the Office team, once again. This is the way to roll out a patch.
This article, "Trifecta: Microsoft patches Office, SharePoint, and Office Web Apps," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.