Microsoft Update Product Team Blog has just announced that the 2007 Microsoft Office System Service Pack 2 will be released April 28, 2009
Besides announcing the formal date and better documentation we can expect a some noteable areas:
- Ability to open, edit and save documents in version 1.1 of the OpenDocument Format for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
- Service Pack Uninstall Tool will allow you to uninstall Office 2007
Now more importantly to SharePoint Buzz visitors is that SharePoint Service Pack 2 will provide the groundwork for future major releases of SharePoint Products and Technologies (aka Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010).
SharePoint Service Pack 2
Service Pack 2 for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 will bring the following changes and enhancements:
- OneNote - SharePoint synchronization has been improved which helps reduce the load on SharePoint servers and produce fewer errors
- An STSADM command line that scans your server farm to establish whether it is ready for upgrade to the next version of SharePoint and provides feedback and best practice recommendations on your current environment.
- SP2 offers support for standards-based documents formats and compatibility with a broader range of Web browsers.
- Substantial improvements to Forms-based authentication.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
- The performance and stability of content deployment and variations feature has been improved.
- A new tool has been added to the STSADM command-line utility that enables a SharePoint administrator to scan sites that use the variations feature for errors.
Excel and Access Services
- SP2 makes it easier to configure Excel Web Access Web parts on new sites. Several rendering, calculation, and security issues have been resolved.
- Some display issues have been addressed.
- Improved compatibility with Mozilla Firefox browsers.
Groove Server
- Improved synchronization reliability.
- Groove Server 2007 Manager will install and run with SQL 2008.
- Groove’s LDAP connectivity and auto-activation functionality have been improved.
- Error reporting in the Groove Relay Server has improved significantly.
- Groove Relay Server has improved robustness.
Forms Server
- Memory requirements and the page load times for large browser-rendered forms have been reduced.
- Browser rendering of various controls, such as the 'cannot be blank' asterisk and the rich text field has been improved.
Project Server
- Better memory management in the queue service.
- Performance to certain database table indexes is improved
- Resource plans, build team, cost resources, and the server scheduling engine have improved.
Search Server
- Improvements to the reliability and stability of very large corpus crawls.
- Backup-restore has been improved.
- A new command has been introduced to the STSADM.exe tool that lets a SharePoint Administrator to tune the Query processor multiplier parameter.
- Improved accuracy in searches involving numbers.
As we wait for April 28, 2009 we will find more official details on what is fixed, new tools provided and the expected better documentation.
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