Officially the second service pack for the Office suite will release next week, and while I’m sure there are a whole swag of features, additions and security improvements that will not be immediately visible to the naked eye. There are a couple of things that peaked my interest when reading through the summary of updates on the “Microsoft Update Product Team Blog”
The first piece of information that caught my eye was the addition of a new STSADM command for assessing how ready your SharePoint server is for upgrade to O14, and also provides best practice feedback for your current environment.
The second little nugget that I noticed is the mention of “Substantial improvements to Forms-based authentication.” while no more detail is provided for this I can only hope that this means the setup and configuration of FBA has been improved and that its now more compatible with web based InfoPath forms.
The third point that interests me is the Form Server improvement around reducing the load times around large web based forms, I’m not sure on the exact improvements that have been made here but I’ll be very interested in to try this out.
The final improvement that I made note has been a personal bug bear for a while and has finally been addressed. That being when a web based form is rendered that contains a required field the “Cannot be blank” message would render above the field, preventing the user from clicking on the field in question. With this Form Server issue addressed I can start using the “Cannot be blank” option in my InfoPath forms again WooT!
For full details on the other updates included be sure to check the link above.
The “Cannot be Blank” is a real pain, but did SP2 actually change anything? Our forms behave exactly the same as before!