Canadian IT business magazine reports that "While the employment situation in Canada's IT sector is as turbulent as in other industries, there are many "bright spots" that IT professionals can take advantage of, industry watchers say."

On the issue of "hot skills" though, there are significant demographic variations, with senior management in various regions across Canada adopting very different approaches.

In Calgary, he said, major projects are also being put on hold and many contractors are becoming available. Pockets of hiring activity here are for roles such as business analysts (BA) and project managers (PM), and people with SharePoint, and LiveLink skills. ...read more

PCMAG reports that the long awaited Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the Office 2007 product line has been released.

"Service Pack 2 updates all editions of Office from Basic to Ultimate, and all Office applications. This means not just the biggies—Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint—but also InfoPath, Publisher, OneNote, Groove, Access, SharePoint, Project, Visio, and InterConnect. "

SP2 also includes server product updates: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server SP2 include fixes and performance improvements. The servers also support more Web browsers, and will run on Windows Server 2008 R2 at its release. SP2 also improves Groove Server's synchronization reliability, LDAP connectivity, and "robustness."

For more information on and links for downloading Office 2007 SP2, head to TechNet's Office Sustained Engineering blog.