Microsoft has confirmed that the next service pack for Office 2007 will be released February-April next year.

"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 a blog posting.

"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 update.

Outlook performance and calendaring 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 will be updated to cover all cryptographic algorithms offered by the operating system.

However, for systems administrators a tool will also be included that allows service packs to be uninstalled should software conflicts arise.

On the server side, Enterprise Content Management is being speeded up, as is processing status approvals from Office Project Web Access into Office Project Professional 2007. SharePoint Services will also be getting new code.