Microsoft Office Systems 2007 – Service Pack 2

Recent announcements around the blog-o-sphere and the announcements at TechEd in Barcelona indicated that the SP2 for Office Systems 2007 is on it’s way.

Releasedates

Don’t even bother to try to get an exact date for your upgrade. As it is said today, the SP2 for Microsoft Office Systems 2007 will be released somewhere between February and April 2009.
If you are to take SP2 into consideration, I would go for the latter timescope (April/May) to be sure :-)

Clients

As announced by the Office Service Pack Team:

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

Servers

As per the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog, the following parts are some of the SharePoint-related things that will be taken care of:

Improved Read-only Content Databases
Whenever a content database is marked read-only, all of the site collections in that database are automatically marked as read-only.

**ECM Performance and Manageability Improvements
**Improved performance and manageability in variations, including STSADM commands for repairing links between source and target pages.

Improved Index Rebuild Timer Jobs
SharePoint content databases running in SQL Server 2005 will undergo an automatic index rebuild, which helps stop defragmentation, and stop the database from degrading in performance.

**Upgrade Checker
**This will scan your SharePoint farm in advance of applying SP2 and will provide feedback on the environments readiness to upgrade.

Summary

I do hope to see some more in-depth details as to what exact improvements are being made regarding the read-only content databases!

Regarding the Upgrade Checker, I think it’s something that should have existed for every SP and KB/Patch you install. Kind of like the “Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor”, but for SharePoint!

More info will be published about SP2 when it’s announced, stay tuned!