Microsoft delivers Service Pack 1 for Office 2013 client and servers

Late last year, Microsoft execs said to expect the company to make available Service Pack 1 for Office 2013 and its complementary servers in "early 2014."

Today, February 25, Microsoft is making good on its promise and making SP1 available for its latest Office client, SharePoint 2013 and Exchange 2013. SP1 includes a variety of stability, security and functionality updates and fixes across the Office family.

For Office client and SharePoint Server, here's a partial list of what's included in SP1:

• Compatibility fixes for Windows 8.1 and Internet Explorer 11 for client and for Windows Server 2012 R2 for server
• Better support for modern hardware, such as high DPI devices and the precision touchpad.
• New APIs for developers.
• Power Map for Excel, a 3D visualization tool for mapping, exploring, and interacting with geographical and temporal data in Excel, is now available to Office 365 ProPlus subscription customers
• Improvements to the Click-to-Run virtualization technology that installs and updates Office 365 desktop applications.
• SkyDrive Pro is now OneDrive for Business

Office 2013 SP1 also includes all public updates and cumulative updates that Microsoft has released between the date when Office 2013 became available (fall 2013) through early this year.

Here's a list of all the fixes in Office 2013 SP1 and SharePoint 2013 SP1.

At the end of last year, Microsoft officials shared a partial list of what would be included in Exchange SP1. Those features include support for Windows Server 2012 R2; support for S/MIME in OWA will be brought back in SP1 (With SP1 customers will have S/MIME support across Outlook, Exchange ActiveSync clients, and OWA); and inclusion of the Edge Transport server role.

Here's the download link for Exchange Server 2013 SP1, and Microsoft's new blog post detailing the updates included.

The SP1 updates for the Windows Installer (MSI) versions of the Office 2013 desktop products and SharePoint 2013 Server available from the Microsoft Download Center, Windows Update and WSUS starting today. After a 30-day period, SP1 will begin releasing as an automatic update through Microsoft Update, Microsoft officials said. For those with Office 365, Microsoft will be including the SP1 changes automatically in their next regular update, Microsoft execs said.

Here's the 32-bit version of Office 2013 SP1; here's the 64-bit SP1 download.

Update: Microsoft also is making updates to Office RT (the version of Office that's bundled with Windows RT) available today, as well. Users will get the SP1 features via Windows Update starting today, a spokesperson said. Project Server also is getting SP1 updates today, too.

Update (February 27): For Office 365 users who just can't wait, WinSupersite's Paul Thurrott has instructions on how to force SP1 early.