Ben There, Done That

Lots of news on the Microsoft Office front today so I decided to add a blog post instead of just twittering about it.

The first items comes from a recent posting by www.microsoft-watch.com.  Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 will be release in two weeks, on April 28.  Two of the largest changes are the PDF/XPS printer will now be included automatically in SP2 rather than the separate add-on download/install that it is now.  The second improvement is the added support of ODF (Open Document Format) documents.  The list of improvements and bug fixes is long, but those are the two major ones in my opinion.

The second one is that Office “14” is going to be Office 2010.  There was a posting earlier about it, that also receive some doubt about it’s validity.  However, this posting by Mary-Jo Foley seems to confirm that the initial posting was accurate, even if the screen shot wasn’t valid.

I’m not going to go on way or the other on the validity of the screen shot, but needless to say, there were plenty of very strong indicators that the next version of Office will indeed by Office 2010.

Details are starting to surface about SharePoint “14”.  One of the details that has been solidified in the last couple of days is the integration of Microsoft’s acquisition of  FAST Search into SharePoint “14”.  Microsoft made the first step towards the integration this past June when they released FAST Search web parts for SharePoint 2007.

It will be exiting to see details of SharePoint “14” continue to emerge and the growth and expansion of the SharePoint platform and search in particular in this case.