It's time for the next stage in the evolution of the Office 2007 System. Microsoft will release Office 2007 Service Pack 2 today, April 28, 2009. The Redmond company has already announced the availability of the service pack; however, at the time of this article the download links for the service pack were not yet live Office 2007 SP2 is available here. Still, it is bound that Office 2007 SP2 RTM (release to manufacturing) will not take all that long to propagate through Microsoft's servers, and that the gold version of the service pack will go live later today. Service pack 2 for Office 2007 is applauded by Microsoft as being a significant stability, performance and interoperability upgrade.

“Users should notice the improved performance and stability of Outlook, better charting functionality in Excel, and more control over the appearance of SmartArt graphics,” explained Jane Liles, group program manager, Office Sustained Engineering. “On the server side, IT professionals will notice several enhancements to the security and performance of SharePoint Server 2007, including support for read-only content databases, improvements to forms-based authentication, and an STSADM command-line utility that enables administrators to scan sites that use the variations feature for errors. SharePoint Server will also feature better support for newer versions of the Firefox browser.”

Liles claims that users can download SP2 for Office 2007 right away, but this is not the case. The Office 2007 Service Pack 2 bits have undoubtedly already been released to web, but it will take some time for the downloads to become available to end users. In addition to releasing Office 2007 on the Microsoft Download Center, the Redmond company plans to serve the service pack through Windows update in three months. Before Office 2007 SP2 will go live through WU and Automatic Updates, Microsoft will make sure to provide a 30 days’ notice.

“Having a wider array of file-format choices should really benefit customers. With SP2, Office 2007 now has built-in support for Open XML, ODF and PDF, along with the dozen or so other formats that were already supported in Office 2007,” Liles added. “In addition to the support for additional file formats, SP2 also includes the Open XML Format External File Converter. This allows developers to make any third-party document format a first-class citizen in Office. This means Office will support most government-preferred formats, and can easily be made to support any others that come along.”

Download Office 2007 Service Pack 2 from Softpedia by clicking here.