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Microsoft reissues Office for Mac patches, delivers PatchGuard interfaces

Microsoft has reissued Office for Mac security patches that it distributed erroneously last week, and released a draft of the PatchGuard APIs for which its security competitors and partners have been clamoring.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

The second time's a charm (Microsoft is hoping, at least).

After erroneously issuing an Office for Mac security update as part of the December 12 Patch Tuesday set of patches, Microsoft pulled the bits, claiming they weren't yet ready.

On December 19, Microsoft reissued the sanctioned patches for Office 2004 and for Office v. X and made them available for public download. Users can apply the patches whether or not they installed the Office for Mac patches that were inadvertently made live last week, according to Microsoft officials.

In other security news, Microsoft has made available the draft releases of its Windows PatchGuard application programming interfaces (APIs) for which a number of its security competitors and/or partners have been clamoring.

Microsoft plans to make the draft APIs available to security vendors for testing and comment through the end of January. The final release of the PatchGuard APIs will be available when Microsoft releases Vista Service Pack 1.

(While Microsoft's blog post doesn't mention a date for Vista SP1, a ComputerWorld story quotes Microsoft officials as saying vista SP1 will be out in "mid-2007." So now there are three different "official" due dates for SP1 floating around: Late 2007, mid-2007, and TBD, or to be determined.)

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