Wait For It…The 2007 Office System Service Pack 2 coming to WSUS in April

<UPDATE date=”2009-04-15”> Seems I was a day early, as Microsoft announced today that the public release date for SP2 will be April 28.  From Gregg Keizer at Computerworld’s article Microsoft sets Office 2007 SP2 release for April 28:

Microsoft Corp. has set April 28 as the release date for Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2), the first update to the company’s popular application suite since December 2007.

Office 2007 SP2 adds support for Open Document Format (ODF) version 1.1 to Word, Excel and PowerPoint; boosts the performance of the Outlook 2007 e-mail client; debuts the ability to uninstall service packs using a separately utility and the Windows command line; and integrates the "Save As PDF/XPS" command into the suite’s applications.

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Sure, this is from the WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) blog, but if SP2 will be available from WSUS, it won’t be far behind on plain old Microsoft Update (nee Windows Update).

Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Office System will be made available to Windows Server Update Services in April, classified as a service pack.  Service Pack 2 includes some significant work, including: built-in ability to save as ODF & PDF formats, improvements to Outlook’s performance and calendar reliability, significant bug fixes for charts in core Office applications, the ability for client service packs to be removed using an uninstall tool, and a host of customer-requested improvements to the Office Server products.  It is also a rollup of all fixes that have previously been released for Office 2007 products.  Additional information will be posted to the Office Sustaining Engineering blog later this month.

Thank you.

-Cecilia Cole
WSUS Program Manager

If you (like I) just can’t wait for that great new software smell, keep an eye on the Office Sustaining Engineering blog.  Synthesizing some of the expected features lists out there on the ‘Net, Office 2007 SP2 should bring to the table:

For Office Desktop Programs

• Improved Outlook Calendaring Reliability
• Improved Outlook Performance (thank goodness!)
• 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

Note the mentions of WSS, ECM, STSADM, etc.  We should expect to see some stability improvements and fixes for MOSS as well.