itaysk

Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Office System Products was just announced (not released). So far the announcement contains a limited list of features that was compiled by asking “the individual teams in Office to come up with a list of changes that they were most proud of and felt would be most beneficial”.
Apparently we will get more info on April 28th.

Read the announcement:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/15/service-pack-2-for-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-due-to-ship-april-28th.aspx
• http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2009/04/16/service-pack-2-for-the-2007-microsoft-office-system-due-to-ship-april-28th.aspx
  

After reading the list of changes, I can’t spot any new interesting feature or drastic change, but reliability, compatibility, and performance improvements mainly. Anyway, here is the partial list of SharePoint related changes:

InfoPath

• Increased compatibility between InfoPath forms and other Microsoft products, such as Groove and Outlook.

OneNote

• SharePoint synchronization has been improved which helps reduce the load on SharePoint servers and produce fewer errors

SharePoint

• 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.

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.

Stay tuned on the 28th…

-- My name is Itay Shakury, and I’m a SharePoint consultant --