2007 Office System Service Pack Due in Spring 2009

Service Pack 2 (SP2) of 2007 Office System will ship between February and April of 2009.

The announcement was made on the Office Sustained Engineering blog posting Announcing Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office System.

Previous announcments had described the increased commitment to interoperability by including support for Open Document Format (ODF), XML Paper Specification (XPS), and Portable Document Format (PDF) in SP2.

In addition to those file format additions, some other highlights that you’ll find in SP2 include:

For Office Desktop Programs:

  • Improved Outlook Calendaring Reliability
  • Improved Outlook Performance
  • Enabling Object Model support for Charts in PowerPoint and Word
  • Improved cryptographic functionality by supporting all cryptographic algorithms offered by the operating system
  • Improved functionality in Excel’s charting mechanism
  • Ability to ungroup SmartArt graphics (and as a result, the ability to add animations to them in PowerPoint)
  • Ability for Visio to export UML models to an XML file compliant with the XMI standard
  • Tool that enables the uninstall of Office client Service Packs

For Servers:

  • Performance and manageability improvements to variations in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) including STSADM commands for repairing links between source and target pages
  • Improvements around processing status approvals from Office Project Web Access into Office Project Professional 2007
  • Improvements to read-only content databases and index rebuild timer jobs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Watch for more detailed announcements from these blogs:

Access Team Blog

Daniel Escapa’s Blog (OneNote)

InfoPath Team Blog

John Guin’s Blog (OneNote)

Excel Team Blog

Project Team Blog

Outlook Team Blog

PowerPoint Team Blog

SharePoint Designer Team Blog

SharePoint Designer Support Blog

Windows SharePoint Services Blog

Word Team Blog