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Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Microsoft Office System - April 28th is the day!

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You can stop holding your breath, as the release date for Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 was announced: April 28th is the big day!  Mark that day down in your calendars and get those browsers warmed up. 

There are, of course, numerous fixes, enhancements, etc for all the products, but since this blog covers SharePoint, I wanted to point out just a small part of what's coming up:

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server SP2:

  • 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 a broader range of Web browsers.

  • Substantial improvements to Forms-based authentication.

Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Server R2 will be supported on their 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.

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.

A few more tidbits about what’s coming down the pipeline for the client side can be found on the Office Sustained Engineering blog.  Of course, I am working with a beta engineer to get a few sneak peeks at new features, and will be posting a lot about that in the near future.

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