My Insights

There is an issue in Vista where a user tries to open a document from a document library in Sharepoint and they are prompted by Office to authenticate themselves. This would be acceptable behavior if the user weren’t already authenticated on the MOSS site they were browsing.

For some reason, when XP users try to open the same document from Sharepoint, they DO NOT get prompted for authentication. This is a Vista only issue. I’ve stumbled across many newsgroup posts that claim that this issue has something to do with the “Protected Mode” in IE7. Their recommended solution is to add the Sharepoint site to Trusted Sites in Internet Explorer 7 and to disable “Protected Mode”.

However, even after adding the site to trusted sites in IE and disabling protected mode, the issue still persists. The issue is only replicable after a fresh reboot - once a user authenticates in office, those credentials are cached for future use. Due to this caching in office, many people cannot pinpoint how to replicate this issue.

SOLUTION 1

The First SOLUTION to this issue is to DISABLE the WebClient service in Vista. Here is a quick script that accomplishes this: VistaMossOfficeMossSSOFix.bat Here is the code for those who’d like to incorporate this script into their environment:

net stop “WebClient”
WMIC SERVICE WHERE Caption=“WebClient” CALL ChangeStartMode “Disabled”

SOLUTION 2

There is also a second workaround that involves tricking IE to use a fake proxy and to have IE bypass the fake proxy for everything - this workaround is PREFERRED since the first Solutions ends up severing some of the nicer integration features between Office and MOSS (such as the ability to save directly from office on to a sharepoint document library)

In Internet Options, click the “Connections” tab and then click “LAN Settings”:

Click “Advanced” and enter * as an exception to the proxy:

Conclusion

In conclusion, the SECOND SOLUTION seems to be more appropriate as the first one tends to do more harm than good.

Often times there are situations where you want to use batch files that run on a continuous basis but are aware of the date that they are running on.

Let me illustrate by using as example. Let’s say that I want to backup a critical executable file on a daily basis by simply using the copy command in DOS but I want the backup filename to reflect today’s date. If today was 08/09/2007, i want my target filename to be backup20070809.exe

In order to accomplish that with a batch file, use the following code-

date /t > temp.txt
set /p date= < temp.txt
del temp.txt

echo %date:~4,2%
echo %date:~7,2%
echo %date:~10,4%

The last three lines can be taken out and you can use the code from the last 3 lines to perform your backup operation

As you can see from the screenshot above, I have a svchost process that is killing my CPU and hogging most of its time. However, since the svchost process is generic and is a container for services on your computer, what is unknown is what exact service is this svchost process running.

In order to troubleshoot to see which service is contained in this instance of svchost, notice its PID (Process ID). Then open up a command window (Start>Run>cmd) and type

” tasklist /svc “

That should give you a list that looks like this:

Notice the entry for svchost.exe with the same PID (Process ID) as the one that is causing trouble. In my case, the instance of svchost causing trouble is hosting 13 different services (talk about unlucky numbers). From here on, simply try shutting each service down and see if it leads to an effect on your performance. In order to selectively shut down each service individually, open a new command window and type-

” net stop <myservice> “

Example: net stop CscService

If you do not see a performance increase after shutting down an individual service then simply turn it back on and move on to the next one. To turn the service back on, use the same command as above but replace ’stop’ with ’start’-

net start CscService

Once you actually do find the rogue service, you can disable it from starting the next time you turn your computer on. To do this, go to Start > Run > services.msc and find the name of the rogue service. The name of the service can be learned from the command prompt where you turned it off. For example, when I type “net stop CscService”, the command prompt will echo “Stopping Offline Files Service”. That should tell you that the name of the service is “Offline Files” and this is what you should look for in the services.msc screen.

Once you find the rogue service in the services.msc screen, simply right click > Properties and choose to disable this service from the drop-down menu.

Let me start off by saying that Internet Explorer 7 was designed for Windows XP and above. So why the misleading title? Let me explain with a picture-

I work on a Windows 2000 machine at work and am not sure if I should be proud or ashamed of my dependence on IE 7 on Vista thereby rendering me inefficient on IE 6. I don’t know how I ever lived on Internet Explorer 6. Anyways, since Internet Explorer 7 just refuses to install on my Win 2000 machine, I thought what better way to get tab functionality than to try FireFox?

So I downloaded and installed FireFox and I hate the default ‘theme’ that firefox comes with. I don’t know WHY somebody would go to great lengths to make a theme that looks like the FireFox default theme on Vista. Anyways, I remembered reading on digg about a Vista Theme for FireFox and I decided to check it out. For some reason, I couldn’t find a download link for the theme on devianart and I didn’t feel like poking around.

I ended up using the myFireFox theme available on mozilla’s website and the above screenshot is firefox using the myFireFox theme. Amazing isn’t it?

Most people with a basic understanding of math will understand the difference between 0.002 Dollars and 0.002 Cents. Apparently, Verizon refuses to recognize that there is a difference! Listen below-

The much awaited TR is here. I was getting quite sick of killing my Outlook process everytime I woke my computer from a hibernate.

I downloaded the Office 2007 TR (about 400 mb), this afternoon. I then went ahead and installed it. The installation process was nothing more than accepting the licensing agreement and clicking next. The entire update however took about 60 minutes on my 4200rpm hard drive (I know!) and it required a restart.

I made the mistake of opening OneNote in the middle of the update and that apparently cancelled the update instead of killing OneNote. I then killed the OneNote process using the task manager and then restarted the update process (60 min).

There have been some GUI changes and the most apparent one is the new icons! I love icons and for those who are dying for a preview, here it is-

Don’t they look cool? Anyways, one thing that the installer said while exiting was that I had at least one other product that needed the TR and I assumed this meant SharePoint Designer or Visio or something that isn’t part of the Office Professional suite. You can see how SharePoint Designer and Visio do not have new icons in the above graphic.

To confirm my theory, I went into my Control Panel and started the “Add/Remove Programs” application and checked the “Show Updates” box on the top. Take a look-

It looks like my initial guess was right even though I didn’t realize that Microsoft Project was not updated as well. Can someone confirm that the graphic above is displaying the old Project Icon and not the new one? In any case, I will download the TRs for these products later this weekend - especially SharePoint Designer which has a history of crashing on me at least 25 times a day.

Another new feature is the Splash screens. They now look different and have the letters B2TR engraved at the bottom right. Take a look at this Word 2007 splash screen-

The first thing I did after installing the TR is opening up Outlook to see if it still froze up on me eventually requiring me to kill its process. So far it has been behaving well and I feel like I can finally live happily ever after.

For the entire summer, I used Outlook 2007 (Beta 2) for email purposes. Although I am still not happy about the IMAP support by this product, overall there have been many improvements.

The UI has gotten more ‘Vista-Like’ for lack of better words. For the novice, that means more gradients and changing backgrounds with hovering mice.

The backend has also seen some new functionality such as integration with OneNote (yet to experience). However for the most part, the backend functionality behaves pretty much like Outlook 2003. If you are an avid Outlook 2003 user then Outlook 2007 will just seem like a new skin on your 2003 version.

About 2 months ago, I discussed this product with gokul over a series of emails and he expressed some concerns about the stability of this product. Although I didn’t relate to his concerns at that time, now that I have started to use this product more heavily, I can see what he is talking about. For example, the search folders on my IMAP account are highly unreliable and “Marking a message as Read” from within a search folder does not really mark the message as read.

I have also integrated my calendar and contacts information by importing using 2003 format .pst files from another instance of Outlook 2003 that I use at my work. The best thing I like about the calendar in Outlook 2007 is the fact that it can be published and subscribed to. To see my published calendar, click the My Schedule link on the right hand side.

Once you visit that calendar, you can actually subscribe to it in your Gmail calendar! Yes, this is one of those rare moments where MS and Google actually work in harmony. In order to subscribe to a published Outlook 2007 calendar in Gmail, first publish your Outlook 2007 calendar. You will get 2 links-

1) One that starts with http:// and ends with .htm: This is actually a MS hosted web version of your calendar. Ignore this

2) The second one starts with webcal:// and ends with .ics: This is the URL to subscribe to in your Google Calendar. However, there is a nasty trick to this. Before copying-pasting this link into google calendar to subscribe to it, change the webcal:// to http:// in order to make it work. Apparently, Microsoft came up with a fake enhancement to the http protocol and called the webcal protocol. It might provide them some extra functionality internally but as far as the iCal format goes, this webcal feed can act like a normal http-iCal feed.

The other issue I had with Outlook 2007 is related to hotsync. When synchronizing my Palm TX with my Outlook, it turns out that HotSync does not support Outlook 2007. There seems to be no update to HotSync to do this. The worse part is that due to this error in Outlook 2007 Synchronization with my Palm, the DocumentsToGo synchronization freezes up the entire HotSync process. It turns out that Outlook 2007 and Documents To Go don’t like each other. The solution was to turn off the HotSync Outlook synchronization and using Pocket Mirror to synchronize my Palm to my Outlook 2007 information. I am currently using a Trial version of Pocket Mirror but I am so happy with it that I might just pay the $29.95 for this software.

All in all, Outlook 2007 has been a fulfilling experience. I can’t wait for the TR (Technical Refresh) to the Beta 2 version of Office. In the meantime (before MS decides to let us know when Beta 2 TR is coming out), I will continue to work around the issues I have encountered with Outlook 2007 with a positive attitude.