Very quietly last week, Redmond released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Server 2003. This should be the last major change before the next version of the server operating system (still codenamed “Longhorn”) ships, possibly by year-end but certainly before the end of the first quarter of 2008.

Network World Senior Editor John Fontana covered the major points of the release in his article last week. The bulk of the service pack is security enhancements, management improvements or bug fix rollups but there are two new features worth mentioning: the Scalable Networking Pack and XmlLite.

The Microsoft Scalable Networking initiative focuses on eliminating potential operating system bottlenecks associated with network packet processing. Through the introduction of new architectural innovations like TCP Chimney Offload and NetDMA, the Scalable Networking initiative seeks to deliver support for the latest network acceleration and hardware-based offload technologies without requiring changes to existing applications or network management practices. The SP2 Scalable Networking Pack is the first delivery from this initiative. There’s a white paper that describes the networking enhancements delivered in the Scalable Networking Pack for Windows Server 2003, including TCP Chimney Offload, Receive-side Scaling, and NetDMA.

The XmlLite library is primarily intended for the use of developers, to enable them to build high-performance XML-based applications that provide a high degree of interoperability with other applications that also adhere to the XML 1.0 standard (see the work of the Technical committees if you’re unfamiliar with the benefits of XML). The primary goals of XmlLite are ease of use, performance, and standards compliance. It’s also the new preferred format for storage of Microsoft Office documents. This should also enhance Novell’s work to increase interoperability between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.

Also noteworthy is that SP2 is the first Service Pack that patches Windows Server 2003 as well as Windows XP Professional x64 RTM via a single update. There are two versions of SP2, a stand-alone version for already-installed operating systems as well as an integrated version to ship with new sales of operating systems. There’s an online data sheet that lays out which operating systems are eligible for the service pack as well as which of the versions of SP2 you should be using.