The new Microsoft Update, instead of checking for updates for only the OS itself, now also checks for updates for other Microsoft software, such as Microsoft Office. But what about our friend Microsoft Office? As it turns out, an enhanced version of Windows Update, called Microsoft Update, was also released in 2005. Windows XP SP2 also encourages you to enable Automatic Updates for the OS.

We now have Windows XP Service Pack 2, which enables a firewall by default. But we had Clippy to help us through it! Microsoft Update: A New Hope Notice that the Auto Update link is HTTP instead of HTTPS. What happens when there is a security update for Office? If you happened to know about the OfficeUpdate website, you could run an ActiveX control to check for Microsoft Office updates. If you knew where the option was in Windows, you could turn on Automatic Updates to download and notify you when OS updates are made available. You've got a shiny new desktop with Windows XP and Office XP as well. Let's go back about 15 years in Windows computing to the year 2002. With the goal of preventing others from making similar mistakes as I have, I outline in this blog post how the way Microsoft Office receives updates has changed. If you are not aware of these changes, you may end up with a Microsoft Office installation that is missing security updates. However, after further investigation, I realized that the update process of Microsoft Update has changed. While investigating the fixes for the recent Microsoft Office OLE vulnerability, I encountered a situation that led me to believe that Office 2016 was not properly patched.

Office 2016 update history