The next service pack for Office 2007 will be released in between February and April of 2009, according to Microsoft.

“Historically, we have waited to communicate details about service packs until their release (or very shortly before),” said the Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering Team in their blog. “As we communicated with SP3 for Office 2003 and SP1 for the 2007 Office System, we will be taking steps to increase transparency and visibility into the Office servicing model at the request of our customers.”

The team went into some detail on new features that will be included in the software suite. Outlook performance and calendaring repairs are going to be improved, as is the object model used for adding charts to PowerPoint and Word documents. Excel’s charting application will also be getting new features. Cryptographic support is going to be updated so that the software supports all cryptographic algorithms offered by the operating system.

(Neowin)