Microsoft Office 2007 SP2, Early Announcement

Office 2007 SP1 is scheduled to be delivered by June 16, 2008. On the other hand, it was too early to be announced that Office 2007 SP2 will be released early next year, within the first half of 2009.

Recently, Microsoft received a complain from Britain about their Open XML. Now, to solve that issue, perhaps the early announcement of Office 2007 SP2 will suffice.

“Microsoft’s support for ODF in Office is a great step that enables customers to work with the document format that best meets their needs, and it enables interoperability in the marketplace,” said Roger Levy, senior vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell Inc. “Novell is proud to be an industry leader in cross-platform document interoperability through our work in the Document Interoperability Initiative, the Interop Vendor Alliance and with our direct collaboration with Microsoft in our Interoperability Lab. We look forward to continuing this work for the benefit of customers across the IT spectrum.”

Also, with SP2, customers will be able to open, edit and save documents using ODF and save documents into the XPS and PDF fixed formats from directly within the application without having to install any other code. It will also allow customers to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007. To also provide ODF support for users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office (Office XP and Office 2003), Microsoft will continue to collaborate with the open source community in the ongoing development of the Open XML-ODF translator project on SourceForge.net.

[ via Microsoft PressPass ]