Sean Wallbridge
Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering released the date for the arrival of SP2 for SharePoint – April 28, 2009 (reference: 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)
Some of the big improvements (at least from my perspective) coming include:
- Revised/improved documentation and knowledge base articles
- The Microsoft Save As PDF or XPS add-in has been built into Office applications in SP2. Users no longer have to download and install the add-in separately
- 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 (whew, I’ve personally struggled with this)
- Outlook Performance in startup, shutdown, view rendering, and folder switch has been improved
Specifically related to the SharePoint Server Products:
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server SP2 include fixes and enhancements designed to improve performance, availability, and stability in your server farms. SP2 provides the groundwork for future major releases of SharePoint Products and Technologies.
- 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.
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.