Almost exactly a year after MOSS 2007 was released, Joel Olesen, Sr. Technical Product Manager at Microsoft, finally shed some light on future product plans with a posting on the official blog of the Microsoft SharePoint Product Group. According to Olesen, a SP1 is due out with AJAX support, compatibility with Windows Server 2008, and -- perhaps most interestingly for existing licensees -- a long list of hotfixes.

Unfortunately the posting says nothing about when the Service Pack is expected and also nothing about whether it will only be available in English at first. According to a source close to Microsoft the SP may come as early as next week.

Many enterprises have caught the SharePoint virus during the product's inaugural year, and we've previously commented on the lack of clear product roadmap. For the very many early adopters it's certainly nice to finally have a few more details about what is coming, but much more information is certainly needed to satisfy the group of large, complex, and global enterprises that have run into a long list of challenges with their initial deployments of the product.

Our vendor-neutral research based on many interviews with licensees around the world shows that in many ways the product is more a .NET development platform, than an out-of-the-box product, despite the heavy marketing otherwise from Microsoft (and some IT departments). We also get many complaints about lack of support for Web standards, something that we're not alone in writing about.

Hopefully Microsoft will do much more than a Service Pack in 2008 to improve the tremendously popular product. Licensees should plan and budget for more than a few hotfixes of the young product.