We feel your pain, Office 2011 users--and so does Microsoft. While the release last fall of Microsoft’s seminal productivity suite took great strides in bringing Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint for Mac into parity with the Windows versions, it also fell woefully short in a few key areas. Help is on the way as an SP1 update for Office 2011 will be released next week, and the main new feature is improved syncing. But there’s a catch…

See, Outlook 2011 SP1 will use Sync Services to sync up your calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes data. That addresses a gigantic flaw with the initial release of Outlook, which synced only contacts over Sync Services--and left many users fuming over the lack of calendar support.

Now for the catch: In late February, Apple announced that Sync Services will stop working with MobileMe on May 5th. Instead, MobileMe will switch to CalDAV, and Outlook 2011 SP1 doesn’t support CalDAV. That means you won’t be able to sync your calendar over MobileMe, but you will still be able to sync it by attaching your iPhone, iPad, etc. to your Mac with a cable.

The absence of over-the-air MobileMe support is pretty disappointing, but Apple only announced the change a little more than a month ago, so we can understand why Microsoft couldn’t respond in time to get CalDAV support into SP1. However, when asked if and when CalDAV support would be forthcoming, Pat Fox, Office for Mac’s senior director of product management, said only, “we’re looking at lots of different options.” Internet, start your fireballs!

If you’re wondering precisely what SP1 will and won’t sync with, Microsoft put together this terrific chart. And along with stability and security enhancements, SP1 supports some other interesting new features, like Redirect and Resend buttons in Outlook, solver integration support in Excel, and Exchange-based server-side rules in Outlook.

What’s your take on SP1? Good stuff, or not nearly enough? Let us know what you gotta have in SP2 in the comments...