According to a post on the Office Sustained Engineering, Microsoft will roll out Office 2007 SP1 via Automatic Update starting with June 16.

The Office 2007 Service Pack 1 was made available for the first time in December 2007, but the company has decided that only now it will be safe to provide it over its automatic update service.

“We released SP1 for Office 2007 to customers approximately 5 months ago and since that time we have had 10’s of millions of downloads and a very good reaction from our customers” said The Office Team in the post form the blog.  

“Given our commitment to advance notice, we wanted to use this blog as one of many avenues to alert our customers to the fact that we will be distributing SP1 automatically via Automatic Update beginning June 16th".

The Office Team noted that the availability will happen gradually and not everyone will see it at the same time, because they wanted to be sure that the service infrastructure could meet the enormous demand for the service pack.

The 2007 Microsoft Office Service Pack 1 (SP1) contains significant security improvements, stability improvements, and performance improvements. The developers fixed, at minimum, the five software bugs that most frequently caused each application in the 2007 Office system to crash. The 2007 Office system SP1 also improves the stability of server components in the 2007 Office system and compatibility with Windows Server 2008.

The 2007 Office system SP1 improves performance in applications that are pervasive in modern offices, most notably: Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

For example, thanks to the new Service Pack users can now open and edit embedded objects that contain other embedded objects, with Office Word 2007

When using smart documents in Office Word 2007, the Document Actions task pane no longer disappears when moving the pointer into the Reviewing pane. Additionally, task panes opened earlier no longer appear unexpectedly.

Also the Service Pack 1 will fix a problem due to which Office PowerPoint 2007 crashed when the user programmatically accesses the parent property of the Hyperlinks Collection Object in the Office PowerPoint 2007 object model.

Thanks to the update, users can open presentations in Office PowerPoint 2007 from e-mail attachments in Office Outlook Web Access.

Also Office Outlook 2007 no longer closes unexpectedly when the junk e-mail rule is set to null and body content in HTML-formatted e-mail messages now appears properly in the preview pane or when the message is opened.

All the examples above are just some of the fixes delivered through the Office 2007 Service Pack 1.