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SP2 for Office 2007 and MOSS Arriving April 28

On April 28, Microsoft plans to release SP2 for Microsoft Office 2007, along with SP2 releases for some of its server products.

On April 28, Microsoft plans to release Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Microsoft Office 2007, along with SP2 releases for some of its server products.

Two of the servers that will get SP2 updates are Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. In addition, the Office 2007 SP2 will include "updates for Project desktop and Project Server 2007," Microsoft explained on Thursday.

Some of the changes that will be enabled with the SP2 releases are described by Microsoft here.

The most notable SP2 changes affecting Office 2007 will be added support for various document formats. SP2 will enable OpenDocument Format (ODF) files to be opened, edited and saved using Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. ODF typically has been used in competing business productivity products, such as Sun Microsystems' free OpenOffice.org suite.

Other file formats supported in SP2 include Adobe PDF and XPS, which no longer have to be installed as add-ins. XPS, or "XML Paper Specification," is a Microsoft-developed format based on XAML that's used for document rendering and printing.

Office 2007 SP2 will work with Microsoft's latest Web browser release, Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft explained. It will also be compatible with "Windows Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows 7 and Windows Server R2."

Microsoft plans to release a Microsoft Service Pack Uninstall Tool that can remove client updates in Office 2007. However, this tool will be available as a separate download from SP2.

On the server front, Microsoft's SP2 releases will update MOSS and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Mostly, the SP2 releases are designed to improve application performance on server farms, according to a Microsoft SharePoint announcement.

IT pros accessing SharePoint via a server farm will be able to check if that server farm is ready for an upgrade to "the next version of SharePoint," according to the announcement. A new test to check for that capability will be part of the Stsadm command-line utility.

The SP2 release will also have added Web browser support for SharePoint. The SharePoint team explained that "Internet Explorer 8 will be added into browser support matrix as level one, and Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 as level two."

And in case anyone missed it, Microsoft also announced forthcoming 2010 products on Wednesday, including Exchange Server 2010 (now available in beta), Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010. With the new SharePoint coming, Microsoft plans to drop the "O" (for "Office") in the MOSS acronym, the company explained.

For those looking for help with the new Exchange Server 2010 beta, Microsoft announced free training. The beta can be either downloaded or tried online.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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