While most of the excitement concerning Windows and Office centres around the next full versions of the products, Microsoft is also working on the next service pack updates for each offering.
In a blog posting on Wednesday, Microsoft said that Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) will arrive sometime between February and April of next year. Microsoft also listed many of the features in the update, which includes previously announced support for the OpenDocument Format.
The Windows team, on the other hand, offered far less detail, only confirming that there will be a Service Pack 2 for Vista.
"Microsoft is working on a second service pack for Windows Vista ... and Windows Server 2008," Microsoft said in a statement. "Service packs are part of the traditional software life cycle; they're something we create for all Microsoft products as part of our commitment to continuous improvement. And, as is standard, Microsoft is continuously having conversations with key stakeholders, prior to broadly distributing test builds. We will share more details in the coming months."
In an interview last week, Microsoft vice president Brad Brooks said that the company had not, at that point, started outside beta testing of SP2.
However, ZDNet.com blogger Mary Jo Foley said that Microsoft has started to recruit testers for Vista SP2. Microsoft also posted a support document earlier this month that suggested a beta version exists.
M$ is rushing to market it's ability to 'open/save' Open Office's document format.
M$ has successfully fought standards for decades - most cleverly using its "embrace, extend, extinguish".approach as well documented at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents
However, now that the ISO standard is OpenOffice's open document format, M$ has seen the writing on the wall. It stood to be excluded from world bodies, government bodies, educational institutions etc.
But M$ has always made it hard for others to reliably open, use and save in M$'s own formats, so the question will remain as to just how compatible M$'s products will be with the new ISO standard. In decades past the logic was "better to avoid those niggling incompatibilities, and stick with M$".. and now it OUGHT work the other way, that if you really want compatibility with open document format, you're better off using the (free) OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org).
Expect some teething problems, as the M$ odf project hit the news last year as a third-party development of an export and import routine... This means a document is likely to be converted from the ISO standard to Word's format when opened, then edited within Word using Word's existing internal data structures and then the document will be re-exported to open document format for saving. And in the end I bet that your only 'guaranteed' way to get the exact same margins, half-point character sizes, exact match fonts etc will be to ignore the ISO odf and stay purely within Word format (ie save all documents in proprietary format)... which will be seen as an attempt to subvert the ISO push for a document standard.