I often hear questions from a number of customers on how to update their current SharePoint installation.
There are numerous updates available for SharePoint, WSS, and other products from the Office servers product line. In this post I will try to share some links I found while I was trying to sum everything up.
The first and the most complete list of all updates available can be found here:
As you can see from the Resource Center, the most important updates are Infrastructure Update (Released July 15, 2008) and Service Pack 1 (Released December 8, 2007)
If you are using languages packs for Microsoft products, you can take a look at the following links:
There are also SP1s for Language packs:
- Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Pack SP1, 32-bit edition
- 2007 Office System Language Packs for SharePoint Server 2007, Forms Server 2007, Project Server 2007, and SharePoint Server 2007 for Search
Installing
Shane Young has a very useful blog post about installing Service Pack 1 for WSS/MOSS. The most important thing to remember is to backup everything. This includes backing up your databases, creating a SharePoint backup and images/snapshots of your server.
Time Frame to implement updates
I would advise you to update your SharePoint installations regularly. However, do not rush into installing an update on a release date. From my experience, you should wait for 3-6 months. If you run into a problem with installation, chances that you will find someone who solved the problem you are facing will be better.
We recently migrated a number of SharePoint systems to the latest version and we had problems with both Infrastructure update and Service Pack 1, but we were not the first ones to encounter these, so we were able to find information on the web that allowed us solve these issues quickly.
Do not forget to update other system components, like Windows Server, SQL Server and Office.