In further anticipation of SharePoint Conference 2014, today Microsoft announced the release of Service Pack 1 for all Office products, including SharePoint 2013. This has been a long time coming. Most of us in the industry were expecting SP1 to arrive sometime last fall, right around the 1 year mark of the product release. There was so much buzz last fall, Microsoft even had to blog to tell us the release date was “coming”. This update covers the following products – Access, Excel, InfoPath, Lync, OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word, Project, Visio, SharePoint Designer, Project Server, Office Web Apps Server, and of course SharePoint Server.
Some of the highlights include:
- Compatibility fixes for Windows 8.1 and Internet Explorer 11.
- Better support for modern hardware, such as high DPI devices and the precision touchpad.
- New apps for Office capabilities and APIs for developers.
- Power Map for Excel, a 3D visualization tool for mapping, exploring, and interacting with geographical and temporal data in Excel, is now available to Office 365 ProPlus subscription customers.
- Improvements to the Click-to-Run virtualization technology that installs and updates Office 365 desktop applications.
- SkyDrive Pro is now OneDrive for Business.
Note this is for on premises deployments only. Customers who have an Office 365 subscription are always kept up to date and will get the SP1 changes automatically in their next regular update.
As with all Service Packs, SP1 also includes all public updates and cumulative updates that Microsoft has released between the date when Office 2013 became available (fall 2012) through early this year.
For a detailed list of all updated features, download this Excel file.
As this was just released today, we have not fully tested the Service Pack at Perficient. We will be applying this to our internal dev environments for testing very soon and will report back with any issues. Feel free to email or comment if you have any questions.
