Andy's Techie Blog

With everything that’s been going on personally and professionally the last few months the newest version of Office sort of skipped by me

Sure I installed the “alpha” when it was released on one of my machines but I wasn’t using it full time

Yesterday I had to do a rebuild of my main office PC so I took the opportunity to install the Beta

This post isn’t about the shiny new features though, it’s about the different suites you’ll be able to purchase

This time around we get four retail versions (from the Office 2010 engineering blog)

Office Home and Student1	Office Home and Business	Office Professional	Office Professional Academic
Word 2010	Word 2010	Word 2010	Word 2010
Excel 2010	Excel 2010	Excel 2010	Excel 2010
PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010
OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010
	Outlook 2010	Outlook 2010	Outlook 2010
		Publisher 2010	Publisher 2010
		Access 2010	Access 2010

On first glance I’m really pleased

OneNote for everybody!!!

However on second glance I’m a bit gutted as you’ll notice that once again there is no InfoPath unless you buy Office via licensing (Office Professional Plus for most businesses)

I commented before on how I think a lot of smaller businesses are missing out because InfoPath is inaccessible to them

It’s frustrating when we can sell Small Business Server 2008 with one of the key features being the inclusion of SharePoint and then not being able to create some really great solutions because a key piece of software isn’t as easily available. A quick search found Infopath 2007 box product to be somewhere in between £100-£140. Licensing is obviously different but if you’re going down that route you may as well just get Professional Plus

So it’s left to the SBS team to save us! Here’s my idea,

If you ever release SBS 2008 R2 (and I understand that is IF) can we get some InfoPath licenses added to the Premium CALS? 

I know that is unlikely to happen but a guy can wish right?

I just wanted to relay a support call I’ve just dealt with as it really had me stumped. For a while I was concerned there was something really bad happening but now that I’ve gotten to the bottom of it I can breathe easy as it wasn’t actually all that serious

Our client called to say that she was expecting an e-mail from their German contractor and it hadn’t arrived. He’d resent it a couple of times to confirm he’d got the email address, etc correct

I logged onto the server and used Exchange message tracking to see if the e-mail had arrived

The message did arrive at the server as expected

My next port of call was to logon to the PC and check Outlook, sometimes I’ve seen similar cases where a filter has been applied by mistake that means the user has “lost” the message. Unfortunately this drew a blank as well

I used the advanced find feature to display all emails that had been delivered today and I even created a search folder to do the same thing but the message was nowhere to be seen

I logged in via Outlook Web Access to see if the message was visible there as I’ve also seen cases where the message is corrupt and Outlook can’t display the message but OWA seems to do ok with it. Again no luck here

So I checked to see if she hadn’t deleted the message by mistake. The message wasn’t in there but when I used the “Recover Deleted Items” feature in Outlook there is was! I thought this would be a simple matter of clicking the message and pressing restore……unfortunately not

After I clicked restore I expected the message to reappear in the Inbox but after waiting a few minutes, nothing

Confused I went back into the dialog in case I’d selected the wrong message. The message was still available for restore so I clicked it again. Once again the message failed to reappear so I went back in again

One of the columns is “Deleted On”, I noticed that time was only a minute ago

I recovered the item again, noted the time, waited a minute and went back in and lo and behold the deleted on time had changed to the time just after I’d recovered the item

Confused I turned to the server, this particular server uses McAfee GroupShield for checking inbound messages for malware so I trawled through the logs to see if it was picking this up as a dodgy message. I wasn’t holding my breath though as this isn’t how GroupShield works (the message is usually quarantined or a part of it replaced and the user alerted). As expected this was a dead end

I was starting to get a little paranoid now so checked the PC over for malware and my initial checks didn’t turn anything up. I even used SysInternals Process Monitor to track what was going on during the recovery to see if there was an outside process doing something but again this didn’t show anything of use

I fired up Outlook in safe mode but didn’t get very far as the recover items feature is an add-in itself!

I decided to keep my attentions on Outlook and created a new profile for the user. This time I disabled Outlook cache mode and recovered the item again

This time the message reappeared as expected!!

As soon as this happened a huge light bulb came on somewhere in the back of my head

There is a feature in Outlook that will ONLY work when cache mode is enabled

Outlook Junk Filter

I went into the options for this it hit me straight in the face!

This is how the junk filter was configured on the PC

Can you see the problem?

Only allow from safe lists and permanently delete suspect messages!!!

I’m surprised she gets any email at all! But if she only receives messages from a group of people that she always emails then they would be on her safe list

The junk filter checks for messages as soon as they arrive in the inbox, irrespective of whether that is because the message is an incoming e-mail or has just appeared there after being restored

I have no idea why this has changed. It must have only have changed recently because as I said earlier the configuration would surely mean she would notice lots of emails going missing.

Once I turned off the junk mail filter I was able to recover the message ok

Ordinarily when a client doesn’t require the Outlook junk filter because they are getting their spam filtered elsewhere I use the Office ADM files and setup group policy to explicitly disable the Outlook filter (Office 2007 version here) so I need to go and set this up I think!

Minor panic over!

I’ve just got back from tonight’s AMITPRO meeting where I was speaking about InfoPath (if your still wondering what InfoPath is I’ll post about this soon!)

All in all I was pleased with how it went down and got some great comments from people there

Since I’m my own worse enemy when it comes to things I do I’m going to critique myself to make sure I learn!

If the ultimate goal was to give everyone an overall view of what InfoPath is, how it works, how much it costs, etc I think i achieved that. Driving back i thought of a couple of things I’d have liked to improve

1) Slides – some slides I skipped over far too quickly. I’d put the slide in there for a reason so why bother not using it?

2) Specific plan – I would have no hope of memorising some sort of script, etc so my plan was to use the slides as prompts and then talk from my own knowledge and experience which I think generally worked ok but i possibly over emphasised some things and glossed over other points altogether as I tried to make sure I covered everything. The other problem with this is that if I had to give the same presentation again it would probably be very different. It also meant I sort of dwindled away instead of having a clear specific ending

3) Speed – it felt to me like I raced through the entire thing though obviously that’s just my perspective as I was concentrating on recalling other things while talking at the same time

4) Demos – My demos weren’t as structured as I’d have liked (this sort of follows on from point 2) which I sometimes ended up wandering down dead ends

We rarely have group members speak at meetings so it was personally big deal for me to get it right. If you were there tonight thanks for your attention. Any feedback you have (good or bad!) is appreciated

I enjoyed the whole experience though I could probably do with a laptop upgrade  

There has been a rumour kicking around the last few weeks that Microsoft are to make SharePoint designer available for free

(Posts from various SharePoint based blogs here, here and here)

Any software announcement scheduled for April 1st always makes me suspicious (a couple of the blog posts I’ve mentioned have updated to say it’ll be the April 2nd now) but the post that made me think this could be the real deal was from the Lady Licensing blog (If you haven’t already subscribed to her blog do it…it’s very helpful!)

Product Licensing Changes to SharePoint Designer, PerformancePoint Server and Forms Server – April 2009

The post outlines that SharePoint Designer will become free (if you have software assurance you can get a copy of Expression Web 2 in replacement) and also says that Performance Point Server 2007 and Forms Server 2007 are to be retired

I’ve got a few thoughts on this so lets start with SharePoint Designer

If this is true then i think it’s a move that makes sense. When your working with SharePoint you have three ways to customise your site

1) Through the browser

2) With SharePoint Designer (SPD)

3) Using developer tools such as Visual Studio

SharePoint designer is sort of pitched as an advanced end user tool but in reality (based on my own experience) someone with specific knowledge would do this on your behalf (such as your IT consultant)

If you want to do anything more advanced then you’d get developers involved who would side step SPD completely so I’ll bet Microsoft aren’t selling too many copies of SPD and I imagine the people who are at this level are using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) as opposed to Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) so they are already paying customers

Since WSS is free making it a part of that adds to the overall feature set and wont make too much of a difference to the Microsoft bottom line

Just for the ability to create workflows alone i think SharePoint Designer is an excellent tool, that’s before you look at any of the other stuff it can do

While it can be quite a scary product (people worry about “breaking” their SharePoint sites) it is extremely powerful and worth getting to know (Penny Coventry’s book on the subject is great!)

Forms Server 2007 and PerformancePoint

According to the information on Emma’s post both of these products are being retired

PerformancePoint is being rolled up into the next release of Sharepoint and will be called “PerformancePoint Services for Sharepoint” (see here for official details). They did the same thing with Content Management Server which helps build on the feature set of MOSS

Forms Server though is an odd one which falls under the same category of InfoPath

I personally think Microsoft missed a trick with InfoPath and the small business market. InfoPath is a very useful tool when combined with SharePoint but it’s one of those products no one knows about. (I have the same argument about OneNote – but that’s for another time)

This is because of the way it is bundled. InfoPath 2007 comes with Office 2007 Professional Plus and Office Enterprise (we’ll just pretend “Office Ultimate” doesn’t exist) which means buying it under a volume license agreement. While we do have customers who buy office in this way lots of them prefer to buy their office software OEM with a new PC

You can buy InfoPath separately but that means boxed product (expensive) or via volume licensing but if you going to do that you may as well get Office Professional Plus right?

So if you don’t already know InfoPath lets you create electronic forms which are much more powerful than anything you could create in Word (which is where most people create their forms!)

They also integrate nicely with SharePoint so you can unlock the data within them and when combined with workflows you can create powerful solutions (timesheets and expense claims i always think are a good examples)

The downside to this is that obviously you must have InfoPath installed to work with the forms. This is where Forms Server steps in. You can create a form and then convert it into a web form so all you need to fill it in is a browser (you can even create forms for your mobile device!)

This functionality is “baked in” to MOSS so the product is aimed for those people using WSS but with the need for web based forms. Generally this means smaller businesses so as an example what costs more?

10 user system

1 copy of InfoPath  + Forms server 2007 and CALs

or

10 copies of InfoPath

I imagine Microsoft aren’t selling too many copies of Forms Server so i can see why this is being retired. I couldn’t find any official announcement so I’m not sure if that’s the end of Forms Server and if you want that functionality you’ll have to move to MOSS or if we’ll see some Forms Server functionality in the next version of WSS (fingers crossed!)

It’s April 1st tomorrow so i guess we’ll at least find out something then!

Just learnt something new!

I’d inserted the following symbol into various parts of my document

I wanted to change one of them and for some reason I double clicked it which displayed the symbols dialog

This is much easier than having to delete it and insert a brand new one again

I’m not sure if this is a new Word 2007 feature or if it works in Word 2003 but it’s something I hadn’t come across before!

I got asked this today so it’s here in case I need it again!

In Office 2003 (Word/Excel/etc) there is an option to be prompted to enter document information (subject, title, category, etc) when you save a new file

In office 2003 it’s on the SAVE tab in the OPTIONS dialog which is very easy to find but it’s a little hidden away in Office 2007

The first thing you need to do is to enable the developer ribbon

OPTIONS –> POPULAR

(Popular options? Like celebrity popular?)

Then once you’ve done that click the DOCUMENT PANEL option in the developer ribbon

Finally you’ll be presented with this dialog box

Put a tick in the box and you’re all set!

It’s weird how people panic when something is slightly different to how they expect

I client called me this morning as she was trying to do a mail merge but it was behaving differently to how her other mail merges work

Basically when she opened the Word document with the mail merge in, Excel also opened at the same time. She was able to view the data and make any changes she needed while doing the merge

This didn’t happen with the other merge

I was initially a bit boggled by this but then noticed as Word was opening the Excel file the status bar indicated it was trying to send DDE messages

DDE is an old technology that allow Windows programs to share data. Previous versions of Word used to DDE as part of the mail merge process.

The default method for Word 2003 (which is what she was using) is to use OLEDB, allowing Word to “talk” directly to the Excel file

You can change this behaviour though

Click on the “tools” menu and select “options”. Then click the “General” tab and put a tick in the “Confirm conversion at option” box. When you create a new mail merge and point to an Excel file it ask you how you want to talk to it and are able to select DDE

I later found out the original mail merge was set up many years ago and the problem she having was with a brand new merge, which is why she’d not seen this before

She could have done her merge using OLEDB but she was in such a panic as the file hadn’t opened that she thought there was a problem

The mail merge actually works fine using both methods but because it wasn’t working as expected she thought there was a problem

Also as a side note…as well as spotting the DDE commands I also noticed a difference in the warning message when opening the Word document

When you open a Word document (as of XP SP3) that talks to external data you get a warning message

Opening this document will run the following SQL command:
SELECT * FROM your datasource
Data from your database will be placed in the document. Do you want to continue?

Details on why this happens and how to disable the prompt (if you want to) are in this KB article

825765- You receive the "Opening this will run the following SQL command" message when you open a Word mail merge main document that is linked to a data source

The DDE based mail merge showed the following SQL command

SELECT * FROM C:\ExampleFilePath\ExampleFile.xls

whereas the OLEDB based merge displayed

SELECT * FROM ExampleSheetName$

This was when I realised the problem was to do with how the data was being retrieved which then led me onto the DDE thing

All good in the end!

I was asked to look at something by a friend yesterday

She was doing a mail merge using Word 2007 with an Excel spreadsheet as the data source

One of the fields was a date and was in the British DD/MM/YY format on the spreadsheet but when she did the merge it was in the US MM/DD/YY format (It also had the time on the end as well)

My initial thought was that I just needed to tell Word to change the format of the merge field but couldn’t see anywhere on the mailings tab to do that

Then I found this KB article

304387 – Date, Phone Number, and Currency fields are merged incorrectly when you use an Access or Excel data source in Word

Basically the underlying data source stores the date as a number and applies what ever formatting you need (if you have any Excel experience this wont be a shock!)

So when it get’s passed through to Word for use in the merge it then applies it’s own formatting

To change the formatting do the following

Find the merge field you want to change and right click it. Then click the “Toggle Field Codes” option

It should change it so it looks something like this (if the merge field is called “Birthday”)

{MERGEFIELD Birthday }

You then have to change the field to tell it you want a specific date format

{MERGEFIELD Birthday \@ "dd/MM/yy" }

The case is really important here

M means “month” whereas  m means “minute”

You can tweak the format as you need for example “dddd dd MMMM yyywy” would give you Friday 3 October 2008

I’ve tried this in Word 2007 but the KB article says it applies to Word 2003 as well

The KB article also points out how can change currently and phone numbers using the same technique

Richard Tubb gave me a call a couple of days ago as he was having a problem with his user account in SharePoint (read about it here)

He mentions I’d had a similar problem

It was along the same lines but worthy of a blog post I think

I have a client who uses an Infopath form as a time sheet. On the form is a drop down list with all the staff members names to identify who the time sheet belongs to. I’d gained access to the user list via one of the SharePoint web services (I posted about this technique here) 

The problem was that some staff members had left the company and after I’d deleted their user accounts the names were still showing up in the Infopath form

This entry on the WSSFAQ site pointed me in the right direction

I had deleted the user from the SITE but not from the SITE COLECTION (e.g a site collection could be 10 sites but specific users only have access to 3 of them. Hence the need to remove them from both places – though I imagine deleting them from the site collection will sort out the other sites)

To do this I did the following

From the site at the top of the site collection click the Site Settings menu then Site Administration. In the “Site Collection Administration” section click  “View site collection user information “

From here I was able to delete the user and they disappeared from the Infopath list

I had an e-mail conversation with a client this week who uses Exchange public folders to share contacts. He initially was planning on creating sub-folders to group the contacts(suppliers, customers, etc)

I suggested he used categories as it would mean it was still one place to go for their contacts but they could use a view to group them as needed

I know this is SharePoint territory…but until they made the move to Office 2007 the inability to edit directly in Outlook wasn’t desirable for them. They now have Outlook 2007 and plans are underway to get them onto WSS 3.0…I digress

So he went away and created lots of categories and emailed me back to say no-one else could see his newly created categories.

This is normal behaviour, Outlook 2007 now stores categories directly in the mailbox as opposed to the registry in older versions of office

So back to the public folder as this doesn’t help solve the problem!

However, he can still categorise the contacts as the item category is totally separate from the users list of categories

e.g If I categorise a contact as “SUPPLIER” and someone else in the office then opens the contact it will still be marked as supplier even if he doesn’t have that category setup on his system.

Fine.

But what if we need to standardise on a set of categories? Without having to re-type all the custom categories this is the solution I came up with

Create a dummy contact (call it anything you like) in the public folder

Categorise it with all the categories you need to copy

The on the PC you want to copy the categories to do the following

Open the item, click CATEGORIZE, then ALL CATEGORIES and you’ll get a screen similar to the following

It shows the categories not on your list as “(not in Master Category list)”

Highlight one of them and click the NEW button to get this screen

The name has been pre-populated.

Just click OK to get the category saved

The only thing this won’t do is bring the colours across but in terms of grouping/viewing the colours are partly irrelevant

Repeat with other categories until your done. Not the most elegant solution but much quicker than typing them all out

If anyone knows of an easier way I’d love to hear from you!