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    Prepare for the Upcoming Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 2

    We’re pleased to announce that Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office system is expected to be released in the near future.  Although we aren’t yet announcing the exact release date, it will fall between February and April of 2009.

     

    Historically, we have waited to communicate details about service packs until their release (or very shortly before).  As we communicated with SP3 for Office 2003 and SP1 for the 2007 Office System, we will be taking steps to increase transparency and visibility into the Office servicing model at the request of our customers.  To that end, we would like to start sharing some details into what will be included in SP2 for the 2007 Office system.  This is by no means an exhaustive list of everything included in this service pack and we will share more details prior to the final release, but we want to start communicating to customers what they should be aware of at a high level. 

     

    To be fair, this is not the first time we have talked about SP2.  Several months ago, we announced that we’ll be further demonstrating our increased commitment to interoperability by including support for Open Document Format (ODF), XML Paper Specification (XPS), and Portable Document Format (PDF) in SP2.  In addition to those file format additions, some other highlights that you’ll find in SP2 include:

     

    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

     

    In the coming weeks, individual product teams across Office will begin updating their blogs and highlighting some of the specific work that they’ve included in SP2.  You can find the links to some of the blogs at the end of the post.

     

    In the next few days we will also invite a select set of Office enterprise customers to a private SP2 beta.  From these customers we hope to gather great feedback about the service pack, including areas that we’ll need to improve upon before we release it to the general public.  Based on the success of the SP2 beta program and customer needs, we will certainly evaluate whether to expand this in the future.

     

    Please check back for additional updates!

     

    Thanks,

    Office Service Pack Team

     

    Access Team Blog

    Daniel Escapa’s Blog (OneNote)

    InfoPath Team Blog

    John Guin’s Blog (OneNote)

    Excel Team Blog

    Project Team Blog

    Outlook Team Blog

    PowerPoint Team Blog

    SharePoint Designer Team Blog

    SharePoint Designer Support Blog

    Windows SharePoint Services Blog

    Word Team Blog

     
    Thanks for reading the article and SPecial Thanks to the Microsoft Team.
     
               "Published Wednesday, October 22, 2008 6:04 PM by The Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering Team "
    Regards
    Waqas

    Some AAM guidance from the front lines

    The ISA Server team recently wrote a nice blog post explaining some of the issues you may face when deploying SharePoint in an extranet.  Many of these issues can be avoided by spending some time up front on planning and testing.  Close collaboration between your firewall/proxy administrators and your SharePoint administrators during this phase is often the key to a smooth deployment.  Here are some helpful articles on TechNet to get you started:

    Thanks.
    Waqas Sarwar

    Troy Starr, Windows SharePoint Services:
    Test Published Monday, October 13, 2008 12:56 AM by sptblog

    Announcing New Daylight Saving Time Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

    Daylight Saving Time (DST, in some countries it is called summertime) exists in many countries. The start dates and end dates of DST change from year to year, and countries may change their policies for DST occasionally. This DST update is an effort of SharePoint product team to reflect these new changes. It includes updated time zone definition information for the following countries:

    • Iraq
    • Argentina
    • Chile
    • Iran
    • Morocco
    • Pakistan
    • Venezuela

    For more detail of this update, please refer to

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956612

    The update can be download here: x86 x64

    You can always refer to this article for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 update deployment guidance.

    Special Thanks to Jie Li, Technical Product Manager, SharePoint, Published Thursday, October 16, 2008 10:49 AM