Services Pack two (SP2) for Workplace 2007 will ship some time between February and April 2009.That;s not a guess (educated or otherwise); that;s the phrase straight from your Workplace staff, by way of the Office Sustained Engineering blog.According to an October 22 posting to the weblog,
Microsoft Office 2007 Professional, Microsoft is gearing as much as invite a group of select testers towards the beta for each the customer and server versions of Workplace 2007 SP2.Amongst the new characteristics coming in the desktop SP are earlier announced file-format changes — specifically support for Open Document Format (ODF),
Office Standard 2007, Microsoft;s own XML Paper Specfication (XPS) and PDF. SP2 also will add improvements to Outlook calendaring reliability and improved Outlook performance overall; improvements to Excel;s charting mechanism; the ability for Visio to export UML models to an XML file compliant with the XMI standard; and an uninstall tool for Office customer services packs.The Server version of SP2 adds improvements to enterprise content-management; improvements to the processing status approvals in Project; and improvements to read-only content databases and index, the blog posting added.Microsoft released SP1 for Workplace 2007 in December 2007, a number of months earlier than many had been ledby Microsoft to expect.I found this part of today;s posting on SP2 to be quite interesting:“Historically, we [the Workplace team] have waited to communicate details about service packs until their release (or very shortly before). As we communicated with SP3 for Workplace 2003 and SP1 for the 2007 Workplace System, we will be taking steps to increase transparency and visibility into the Office servicing model at the request of our customers. To that end, we would like to start sharing some details into what will be included in SP2 for the 2007 Workplace system. This is by no means an exhaustive list of everything included in this company pack and we will share more details prior to the final release,
Microsoft Office 2010 Professional, but we want to start communicating to customers what they should be aware of at a high level.”I wonder if the Workplace unit;s willingness to start talking publicly about SP2 will end up influencing the Windows team at all. The Windows team is believed to be ready to start testing SP2 for Vista and SP2 for Windows Server 2008 inside the next few weeks,
Office Home And Business 2010 Key, even though the team refuses to comment on its schedule or the expected attributes. All customers — not just a small,
Windows 7 Home Premium Key, choose few beta testers — want and need to know what kinds of characteristics and fixes are on the Microsoft product roadmaps.(Thanks to WinBeta for the pointer to Microsoft;s Office 2007 SP2 posting.)