What's new in Office 2013 Service Pack 1 (SP1)

 

Applies to: Office 2013, Office 365 ProPlus

Summary: Provides information to IT Pros about where to download Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Office 2013 and new capabilities included in SP1.

Audience: IT Professionals

Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Office 2013 is now available. Other related products—such as Project 2013, Visio 2013, and SharePoint Server 2013—have also released an SP1. The Office Updates blog has the full list of these products. The blog post also provides links to additional information about each SP1. For example, where you can download them and what updates are included in each SP1.

We want to highlight some things you’ll want to know about SP1 before you deploy it to your users.

What’s new for Outlook in Office 2013 SP1?

In most organizations, users rely heavily on Outlook every day. So you’re probably most interested in what’s new for Outlook in SP1. If you’re in charge of Exchange Server, provide support for users, or develop apps for Outlook, we have information about the new Outlook capabilities in SP1 that you’ll want to know about.

For admins who deploy Office 365 ProPlus

By default, Office 365 ProPlus is automatically updated in the background from the Internet. This means that users in your organization who have Office 365 ProPlus don’t have to do anything special to be updated to SP1.

But, some organizations use the Office Deployment Tool to deploy and update Office 365 ProPlus. If that’s what you’re doing, there’s a new version of the Office Deployment Tool that you should download. We recommend that you always use the latest version of the Office Deployment Tool.

One benefit of using this new version is that you can use the new Deadline feature. This lets you set a deadline by when updates to Office 365 ProPlus must be applied. If the deadline is reached and Office 365 ProPlus hasn’t been updated, the required updates will be applied automatically.

For admins who use Telemetry Dashboard

If you’re using Telemetry Dashboard to monitor Office compatibility, you’ll have to update some Telemetry Dashboard components after you install Office 2013 SP1. If you don’t, you’ll see an error message when you try to connect Telemetry Dashboard to the telemetry database. You can learn how to update these components in Update Office Telemetry components for Office 2013 SP1.

In addition to SP1 for Office 2013, there are some other downloads related to SP1 that might apply to you, depending on how you deploy and manage Office.

Group Policy:   If you use policy settings to configure Office, download the latest Administrative Template files (ADMX and ADML files).

Office Customization Tool (OCT):   If you use the OCT to deploy Windows Installer-based (MSI) versions of Office, download the latest OPAX and OPAL files.

Office Web Apps Server:   If you have deployed Office Web Apps Server, make sure that you download Office Web Apps Server 2013 Service Pack 1.