While working its way to Office 14, Microsoft is also hard at work building the second service pack for the Office 2007 System. Back in October 2008 a member of the Office Service Pack team indicated 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.” Well, February has come and gone, and so did March. At the start of April the only download of Office 2007 Service Pack 2 comes from torrent trackers, namely the leaked Build 12.0.6416.1000. The bits offered for download were removed from at least one top torrent website and there is no confirmation at this point in time whether Build 12.0.6416.1000 is a legitimate release or not.

The second service pack for the Office 2007 System has slipped past the initial availability deadline announced by the Redmond company. At this point in time Microsoft has offered no information related to the progress done with the service pack. Although the software giant should have already released Office 2007 SP2 to manufacturing, Microsoft is mute on the progress of the development process.

Office 2007 SP2 Build 12.0.6416.1000 is labeled 012.0_B2TR_PRE.0_BTA_EN in the End User License Agreement, pointing out that the release is merely a Beta development milestone. Considering that the Redmond company was laboring to produce Office 2007 SP2 between February and April 2009, the service pack should have evolved further than the Beta stage, to at least Release Candidate or RTM-Escrow. Microsoft did serve a Beta of Office 2007 SP2 in 2008 to a select group of testers, but the testing program was not expanded, and the company offered no details on the development process of the service pack.

According to the Office Service Pack team representative, the Office 2007 SP2 brings to the table:

“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.”

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