I was visiting a client his week, and I came across a situation that I’ve seen a number of times. They were running a relatively new version of some software, but they were behind a service pack level (they were running service pack 1, and the current recommended level is SP2).

I was thinking about this a bit, and it occurred to me that this is a tendency I’ve seen a few times previously; a tech support provider feels that things are stable and working properly. So why bother to upgrade to the latest service pack? After all, it might break things, right?

Not always.

The thing about service packs is understanding what they’re there for a reason. Software companies don’t just sit around wondering what to do with their time. If they come out with a service pack it’s usually there for a reason.

Sometimes, and most often, it’s a collection of security patches. Microsoft, for example, releases patches every month (but that’s another post for another time… and maybe another blog). And every year or two they come out with a service pack for most of their products.

You’d think that if you kept up with your patches that you’d be okay. But the fact i that every once in a while they add some really good stuff to their service packs, that don’t get released very widely otherwise. Good examples of this are Exchange 2003 SP2 and Windows 2000 SP4.

Windows 2000 SP4 fundamentally changed the way that the operating system was built. It was a major upgrade, and for the better. Many programs today, if they work with Windows 2000 at all, will list SP4 as a minimum requirement. And Exchange 2003 SP2 introduced native support for the Intelligent Message Filter, a spam filter fort he Exchange email system. Granted it was available before as a separate product, but many people didn’t know about it. And like it or not, it actually does work and make a difference.

The point is, there’s often good compelling reasons to make the upgrade. Of course, you still need to test in your environment, and make sure that things don’t break. And as a computing pro, I never update a service pack in the first three months of availability (I’ll let other flesh out the bugs, thank you very much). But once it’s out there, and a few of the bugs are known, I generally push to get an update done.

So check with your technical service provider, and find out if it’s time for your software to pay a visit to the service station.