Outlook 2003 SP2 and SharePoint SP2 Releases

Over the last few days a number of Microsoft Office updates have been released in form of Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 2. I won’t pretend to talk about something I don’t know so I’ll just talk about Outlook: New phishing bar. All I can say is: about the damn time guys. This protection is available right now and you can take a look at it on the left. Just be careful because in order to enable this you will need Outlook 2003 SP2 and the latest Outlook Junk Filter update. Once both are installed the protection is enabled automatically as you can see on the left. There is also a “phishing” bar that pops down when you open a message that is suspected to have phishing in it. Unfortunately, thanks to ExchangeDefender I have never received a phishing email so I have nothing to test and demo this with.

Here is Microsoft’s description:

SP2 contains a new Phishing Protection feature to be used with the Outlook Junk Email Filter. Phishing is the luring of sensitive information through e-mail, such as passwords and other personal information, by an attacker masquerading as someone trustworthy. Phishing attacks can result in a user divulging sensitive information, including financial information, that can result in a loss of privacy or money. Phishing e-mail is hard to identify, because attackers make their e-mail appear genuine and often mimic recognizable e-mail sent out routinely by legitimate organizations such as banks and credit card companies.

SharePoint SP2 has also been released and there are quite a few new features. According to Susan Bradley this is also SBS-ready although I am not sure why that had to be explicitly defined (SharePoint Team Services is SharePoint is SharePoint is SharePoint). I guess people doubting this just haven’t installed SBS 2003 SP1 which explicitly required SharePoint SP1 to be installed. Something is news every day I suppose…. and considering that take a look at the brief overview of what will be provided with SharePoint SP2 in Windows R2.