Microsoft Coquettishly Discusses Office 2007 SP2

In a Wednesday post to the Office Sustained Engineering blog, members of the Office Service Pack Team said plans are to release Office 2007 SP2 sometime between February and April of next year.

Why is Microsoft giving users several months advance notice for Office 2007 SP2? According to the Office Service Pack Team, Microsoft wants to "increase transparency and visibility into the Office servicing model" in response to the customer feedback (and presumably, complaints) that Microsoft received during the run-up to the Office 2007 SP1 and Office 2003 SP3 releases.

Office 2007 SP2 adds support for Open Document Format (ODF), XML Paper Specification (XPS), and Portable Document Format (PDF); adds performance and functionality tweaks for Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint, and Word; and offers a tool that uninstalls previous Office client service packs. Several server-related enhancement are also included in the update.

In the next few days, Microsoft will organize a select group of Office enterprise customers to test a private beta Office 2007 SP2. The testers' feedback will allow Microsoft to determine, with a greater degree of accuracy, what Microsoft needs to do to prepare SP2 for public release, according to the Office Service Pack team.