No good deed goes unpunished.  Just as I completed significant platform upgrades of my dev and classroom environments, Microsoft announces the release of availability of the next service pack for the Office system, including the SharePoint platform.  It looks like I’ll be doing another BIG update soon.  As for the new environment, I’ll wait another 10 days to begin the implementation, so as to take advantage of the new enhancements in Office and SharePoint 2007.

SharePoint 2007 (WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007) SP2 is due to ship April 28th (just 10 days from now)!  The announcement was made on the official SharePoint Team blog on Wednesday.  There are some cool new functionality being released with this service pack.  Also, as Joel Oleson pointed out, kudos should be directed to the update teams for sharing the information early, rather than the typical surprise tactic we get with service packs.

Key items found on the Office Sustained Engineering team blog on the SharePoint 2007 SP2 release:

• 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 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Service Pack 2 adds the ability to open, edit and save documents in version 1.1 of the OpenDocument Format for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These applications now let users save, open, and edit files as OpenDocument Text (*.odt), OpenDocument Spreadsheet (*.ods), and OpenDocument Presentations (*.odp).

• The 2007 Microsoft Office Service Pack 2 is the first service pack to support uninstall of client updates through the Microsoft Service Pack Uninstall Tool for the 2007 Microsoft Office Suite as well as via Windows Installer command line. The Service Pack Uninstall Tool will be available as a separate download.

• The Microsoft Save As PDF or XPS add-in has been built into Office applications in SP2. Users no longer have to download and install the add-in separately.

There are also enhancements to Groove and Project Server, as well.

However, as Joel pointed out, at least we are prepared for the service pack thanks to great documentation from the team.