[WinPartners] Windows XP SP2 Release Effort Underway

[Deb Bowser]

Date:  Monday, June 21, 2004
To: itpartners at mit.edu, winpartners at mit.edu, sw-release-announce at mit.edu
From: Deb Bowser <bowser at mit.edu
Subject: Windows XP SP2 Release Effort Underway
Cc: is&t at mit.edu, itag at mit.edu, kakapo at mit.edu


Good day,

With the upcoming release of Service Pack 2 for Windows XP (SP2) by 
Microsoft expected this summer, IS&T has begun the process of testing and 
evaluating the Service Pack within the MIT environment. As this is a major 
patch for a widely supported operating system, IS&T will be supporting it. 
The value we can add is to test and share a list of known issues to the MIT 
community.

Unlike hotfixes and security patches, we recommend that you wait for our 
recommendation and list of known issues and work-arounds before upgrading 
to SP2 on production machines and encourage those of you with test 
environments to test the service pack once it is released by Microsoft.

In that effort, we would greatly appreciate your assistance in reporting 
any problems (and solutions) you have or will uncover with SP2 and the 
applications and services you use.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) is currently in beta and provides enhanced 
security measures that will hopefully improve defences against viruses, 
worms and hackers, along with increased manageability and an improved 
experience for users. In addition to security and bug fixes, it will change 
many default settings to improve security.

We will maintain the list of problems and fixes on the Windows XP SP2 
Release Notebook at:
http://web.mit.edu/swrt/releases/winxpsp2/

New Features:
SP2 changes Windows XP significantly.  One major change is the Internet 
Connection Firewall (ICF) as was previously known in SP1 is now named 
"Windows Firewall" and has its own icon within the control panel.  Windows 
Firewall is on by "default" and can block outgoing as well as incoming 
network traffic.

Another addition is the "Security Center" to the control panel.  This 
setting allows users to enable/disable the Firewall, check Automatic Update 
settings and inform the OS as to whether you already have Anti-virus 
software installed.  Preliminary findings show that SP2 works for the most 
part on stand alone Windows XP Professional workstations.

You can check out the release notebook for additional information 
concerning known issues and their fixes. If you choose to install SP2 
before a recommendation is made, please test it on one or two 
non-production machines before deploying to more machines.  If you install 
the beta version of SP2, you must uninstall it before you install the 
commercially released version of the service pack.

We do not recommend installing any beta software on non-test machines.

Readme for the beta version of Windows XP SP2:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/readmesp.mspx

We will report back our findings in about a month.

SP2 contains 300+ bug fixes and security enhancements. A complete list is 
available at:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/deploy/relsprc2.mspx


Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 Release Candidate 2 Fact 
Sheet:  http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/winxp/WindowsXPSPFS.asp


If you have any questions or discover any problems with SP2, please send 
e-mail to winxp-release at mit.edu.

Regards,
Deb Bowser
MIT IS&T
Software Release Team
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