Update: Vista SP1 Beta might be released next week.

There have been rumors recently that the release date of Service Pack 1 for Vista might not be too far away. Now, Joe from ITsVista digged up a sentence in a Microsoft statement making it very clear that we won’t see Vista SP1 this year.

In a Joint Status Report on Microsoft’s Compliance with the Final Judgements (PDF) he found this:

Microsoft will deliver the required changes in Service Pack 1 of Windows Vista, which Microsoft currently anticipates will be available in beta form by the end of the year.

If the beta will come out only by the end of the year, the earliest release date for the final is in the first half of 2008. Since Microsoft is under time pressure with Windows Server 2008 we might even have to wait until the second half of 2008.

Considering that there seem to be some people at Microsoft who think that service packs don’t play an important role anymore because Windows Update provides all the fixes anyway, it is also possible that Vista SP1 doesn’t have absolute priority in Redmond.

The problem I have with this view is that rollouts with many machines involved will cause heavy traffic in your network and a high load on your patch management backend, if all machines are going to pull the updates at the same time. There also is a certain risk that a worm infects one of the computers before all patches have been installed.

You could create a new Vista image which includes all the patches you received thru Windows update. However, I always prefer to rollout a new operating system after the first service pack has been available for some time. A service pack is a new base for everyone. It simplifies troubleshooting because it assures that all patches have been installed and not only a certain subset. This is also important for third party software vendors. The longer MS waits with this SP, the more heterogeneous Vista installations will be out there, complicating matters more and more.

Originally, I planned to start the first major Vista rollout within this year. But with this new information I am on the verge of changing my mind and wait until it is clear when SP1 will really be available.

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