According to a message posted Thursday on the Office Sustained Engineering blog maintained by Microsoft software designers, the company is giving more than a month's notice to customers that it will employ Microsoft Update (MU) to automatically distribute the first package of updates and fixes for Office 2007.

Microsoft's move to give computer users ample notice of the service pack distribution is part of an effort to keep up with heavy demand for the updates, the engineers said.

"The availability will happen gradually and not everyone will see it at the same time," the blog post said. "This is necessary to ensure that our service infrastructure can meet the enormous demand for the service pack."

The Office 2007 service pack was first introduced as a manual download on the Office homepage, and his since been tapped "tens of millions of times," according to the blog post.