Microsoft released Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 earlier this week. According to Microsoft, this is "a major performance update" to the popular office productivity suite. An area of focus in SP2 involves boosting application performance to applications such as Outlook. According to Jane Liles, group program manager of Office Sustained Engineering at Microsoft, "Outlook 2007 SP2 is 26 percent faster than its predecessor on a set of common email tasks and is even faster--35 percent--with larger mailboxes."

Unfortunately, a number of corporate users who have upgraded apparently encountered a major bug in Outlook that affects the ability to access the Global Address Book. The problem for one user went away after removing SP2; expect a fix from Microsoft for this bug soon.

Users from smaller firms or who don't rely on the Global Address Book might want to install SP2 for its performance gains.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at PC World