Thanks to Mary-Jo (who in turn thanked WinBeta) we have this post from the Office Sustained Engineering blog, announcing that Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 will be available between February and April 2009.

They’ve previously noted that SP2 would include support for Open Document Format (ODF), XML Paper Specification (XPS) and Portable Document Format (PDF) – you’ll be aware that some of these are supported via separate add-ons at present.

However, these also a raft of new features, including the following:

For Office Desktop Programs:

  • 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
    For Servers:
  • Performance and manageability improvements to variations in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) including STSADM commands for repairing links between source and target pages
  • Improvements around processing status approvals from Office Project Web Access into Office Project Professional 2007
  • Improvements to read-only content databases and index rebuild timer jobs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

This is awesome news. Why? Because this is much more than a few fixes. Take one of these items as an example: Visio UML export to XMI compliant formats. This is a big task, and yet they’ve chosen to do it even though the usage will likely be minimal. Or what about adding object model support for Charts. Another big item.

Fair enough, things like improving Outlook Performance are much needed, but in general we are impressed with how extensive the ongoing support and improvement that Microsoft provides is.

Keep up the great work.