Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Outlook 2007 crashes on Import/Export

Lets say you are trying to export your contacts to a Tab Delimited Text file or CSV file. The process begins but outlook crashes right away leaving the following event in your event log

Event ID: 1000
Source: Microsoft Office 12

Discription:
Faulting application outlook.exe, version 12.0.6514.5000, stamp 4a89dc70, faulting module oladd.fae, version 12.0.6500.5000, stamp 49a6ed5f, debug? 0, fault address 0x00008c24.

One of the reasons why it might happen is that Microsoft Exchange Management Tools for Exchange 2007 are installed on the computer and Microsoft says it not supported.

To Fix it

Open command prompt and type fixmapi and press enter (there will be no notification, its instant)

Make sure Outlook is closed while you do the above, reopen Outlook and try to Export it should now work fine.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 logon delays

Consider the following scenario:

  • You have a computer that is running windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.
  • You set a solid color as the desktop background.
  • The Desktop Window Manager Session Manager service is running.
  • You log on to the computer locally.
In this scenario, the Welcome screen is displayed for 30 seconds during the logon process.

So if you like a plain desktop, its not necessarily what Microsoft thought was the case.  One of the reasons why you might face the issue of delayed logons can be that you have chosen a solid color for your desktop.

see the following link for more details and a hotfix.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977346

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

NPS Setting for SafeWord 2008 with Cisco Router

When using Aladdin SafeWord 2008 with RADIUS authentication installed on Windows Server 2008, Network Policy Server (NPS) needs to be configured for RADIUS authentication with the router as RADIUS client. For Cisco routers the following authentication settings will work.

Unfortunately the documentation for Aladdin SafeWord 2008 does not provide the following steps, so I decided to put it here for anyone who can benefit from it.

After you have installed SafeWord 2008 successfully, made sure all SafeWord services have the startup type – Automatic and have activated it. Now its time to work on RADIUS Authentication, following steps describe the complete process:

  1. Open Start --> All Programs --> Aladdin --> SafeWord --> Configuration --> IAS Agent Configuration
    Under Authentication Policy click on Groups and make sure the following options are selected.ScreenShot065
  2. Steps below are for NPS settings
    * Open NPS Console, Right Click RADIUS Clients and select New RADIUS Client option
    * Provide following details based on your environment.
    ScreenShot066
  3. Go to Policies --> Network Policies (Right click and choose New) and Follow the snapshots below

    ScreenShot067

    ScreenShot068

    ScreenShot069 
    Authentication methods are very important
    ScreenShot070 
    Click next in all the windows after this and finish at the end.
  4. Make sure that this newly created Network Policy is on the top and if you want disable all the other listed network policies by default.
  5. No need to touch the connection request policy already there.

That's it!! NPS authentication with SafeWord 2008 should work fine now.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

So-called GodMode in Window 7 !!! I call it AdminMode.

I don't like the idea of calling a cool shortcut or trick “GodMode”. However as you might have guessed, I like the trick itself. I would call it “AdminMode” because that's what it is.

In Windows 7 you can create a new folder anywhere with the following name

AdminMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

You can change “AdminMode” to whatever you want to name the folder. After the folder creation is complete you will see it listed as following.

image

When you double click it, you will see a list of commands which are either well hidden or require a few clicks to get to. With the help of AdminMode you get easily access all of these cool features at one place. What's even more great is that you can create a shortcut by right clicking any option and choosing create a shortcut, it will place a shortcut on your desktop.

Enjoy Windows 7 !!!!

Users cannot logon to the Terminal Server

When users try to logon to the terminal server they get the following error

Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service

or their sessions just drops during the login process without any errors.

In this case one of the reason could be that your terminal server is handling the memory usage correctly.
check the event log to see if you can find event 1500 and event 1508 for each unsuccessful logon attempt.

if yes then use the following method:

To resolve this problem, modify the registry to increase the PoolUsageMaximum value and the PagedPoolSize value. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
  2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

  3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
  4. In the New Value #1 box, type PoolUsageMaximum, and then press ENTER.
  5. Right-click PoolUsageMaximum, and then click Modify.
  6. In the Value data box, type 60, click Decimal, and then click OK.
  7. If the PagedPoolSize registry entry exists, go to step 8. If the PagedPoolSize registry entry does not exist, create it. To do this, follow these steps:
    1. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
    2. In the New Value #1 box, type PagedPoolSize, and then press ENTER.
  8. Right-click PagedPoolSize, and then click Modify.
  9. In the Value data box, type ffffffff, and then click OK.
  10. Exit Registry Editor, and then restart the computer.

source: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/935649

Friday, January 8, 2010

Roaming Quick Access Toolbar

Office 2007 is packed with useful new features. Quick Access Toolbar is one of them, although the concept is not new but the ease with which you can add the buttons to quick access toolbar is what I would call a new feature. With Quick Access Toolbar you can have a collection of frequently used commands on the top of the ribbon, in the title bar. To add an option to the quick access toolbar just right click on any command on the Ribbon in any Microsoft office program and select the option “Add to Quick Access Toolbar”

Of course we all know that, we also know that this toolbar is actually saved as a file in your profile at the following location

"%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\*.qat

all the files with .qat extension are quick access toolbars for the related application.

When using roaming profile it becomes an issue because as you have noticed that the qat files are in Local Settings folder, which doesn’t get saved with the roaming profile. So to have all users’ Quick Access Toolbar in the roaming profile we need to do two things. First following registry DWORD needs to be created for each user.

HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Toolbars

New DWORD –> QuickAccessToolbarRoaming
Value –> 00000001

Above can be achieved in many ways, easiest of them could be to use Group Policy Preferences.

Now we  the second step is optional because it is completely for user satisfaction. For the users who have already added their favorite commands to the QAT, once the roaming is activated they will lose their settings. To prevent it you can add the following line to a logon script or just create a new batch file and have it applied as logon script for all users.

move /Y "%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\*.qat" "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\"

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Disable Send Out of Office auto-replies to External Senders in Exchange 2007

You don’t want users in your organization to send Out of Office Auto-replies to external recipients and also you don’t want the option to appear in Outlook 2007 like shown below

image

To disable/hide the option Outside My Organization in Out of Office Assistant in Outlook and in OWA use the following in Exchange Management Shell.

Set-Mailbox <mailboxid> -ExternalOofOptions InternalOnly

This can be changed per mailbox, if you want to be applied to all mailboxes there are many ways of approaching it. You can get mailboxes on a server and pipe it with Set-Mailbox with above settings Or the following will apply it on all mailboxes in an exchange organization.

Get-Mailbox –ResultSize Unlimited | Set-Mailbox -ExternalOofOptions InternalOnly

-ResultSize Unlimited is important otherwise it will change the setting for the first 1000 mailboxes.

For more details on Out of Office Assistant refer to the link below.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/10/06/429115.aspx

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Send as permissions disappear – Exchange 2007

You granted send as permissions to an account from Exchange Management Console in exchange 2007 environment and realize that after an hour later the permissions have disappeared, in fact any other explicit permissions that you granted through Active Directory have gone as well. This will also becomes an issue for organizations using BlackBerry.

Above is by design, read this for more details.

To fix the issue:

Remove the account from any of the following group

  • Administrators
  • Account Operators
  • Server Operators
  • Print Operators
  • Backup Operators
  • Domain Admins
  • Schema Admins
  • Enterprise Admins
  • Cert Publishers

If that's not an option then see the work around in the following KB Article.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=907434 

This applies to any version of Microsoft Exchange.