David Overton's Blog

[updated 24th January 2009 with new download location for x64 systems] [updated 31st December 2009 with Windows 7 information] I have been asked this question several times and finally dug into the system to make it work. N.B. while this will work with Windows 7 the "agent" will have a pink background. Given the age of this technology it is unlikely to be fixed. The solution The Office Assistant relies on some "agent" technologies. To fix this we need to install the agent technologies and then copy a DLL across. Since I was playing around it is possible that there is an extra step or two that is not actually needed, but since this is a small process and simple to do I don't think it will do any harm. What is more, I was not about to rebuild a system, load Vista and Office 2003 just to see if I could remove a 10 second step :-) Download the MSAgent technology from http://www.microsoft.com/msagent - select the CORE files, so for me that was this item - Download the Microsoft Agent core components...

Maybe it is just me, but I often want a huge clock on my PC when I am in a hotel, and I want there to be a wake up call. This web site gives me exactly what I want - http://onlineclock.net/ ttfn David

If any of this sounds really useful, then why not book on a local ignite tour - for the 1st time we are coming as the small business team to your location. The events have plenty of technical show how (i.e. we will show it, might even show a config screen or two, but not build and install it in front of you). Click http://www.microsoft.com/uk/partner/training/ignite/default.aspx to book on the event and click on a location close to you on the map and select the Small Business Ignite or, if you are into CRM, the CRM one. Overall the event lasts 2 - 2:30hrs and is very interactive. While you may say you know everything about these technologies (and thankfully, to date, everyone has learnt something about the technology at the events) The existing ignite tours have been very well received - I got a mail today saying - if you liked the event and have already been to one, drop a comment and say how much you did so: "I always come away from your presentations fuelled with new ideas which I can implement for customers...

[updated 16:42 9th May 2007 with url for MS Support of this] [updated 9:45 22nd July 2007 with url to fix for install dialog coming up with word] I was recently asked in Office 2003 and Office 2007 can co-exist on the same system. The answer is yes, except for Outlook which as in previous versions get a little precious if this is attempted (it will not let you do this, btw). You can choose to have them both installed to the same drive or one to an external hard drive, it does not matter. The key option is when installing Office 2007 is to customise the options and select to NOT uninstall the previous versions. When you install both copies of Office to be installed on 1 machine that switching between Word 2003 and Word 2007 will result in an install dialog box coming up. See How to get rid of the installer / configuration dialog when running Office 2007 and Office 2003 on the same system - for Vista and other versions of Windows to fix this. For more support information, look at http://support.microsoft.com/default...

I was browsing Nick Whittome’s blog when I came across this : Sage Line 50 Version 12 - A fix for the ACCREP32.DLL error I would like to publicly thank Sage – specifically Lydia Coakley in Sage Ireland – for listening to my whining and helping me work directly with the Line 50 Development team on getting a fix . Please note that this fix is unsupported at this time, but should be in an update to the version 12 patches soon. In the mean time, this will get your Sage Line 50 version 12 working correctly with Outlook 2007. Good to see them moving on this. Ttfn David Published with BlogMailr

I've had a few people ask where they can buy my book so I thought I would lay out the options. You can always purchase both the book and / or the e-book from Packt Publishing at this address however for those who wish to buy elsewhere, you can. Book or eBook Free shipping! US, UK, Europe & selected Asian countries This is the RAW book (Read as Written). More Information here To buy or pre-order, click here Book and eBook. Pre-order now! Print only price £27.89 save 10% eBook only price £13.19 save 40% Amazon in UK Amazon in USA Anywhere in the world Anywhere in the world I hope you enjoy the book. For a brief summary of the chapters go here and you can preview a chapter from the book here -(Sample Chapter 4 Installing SBS 2008 and Connecting to the Internet [2.0 MB]) . If you wish to request a copy to review, look at the Request a Review Copy page. I have now embarked on my 2nd book project and you can find out more about it here - http://davidoverton.com/blogs/doverton/archive/2011/08/27/windows...

[updated 9th August 2007 to add read/write document registry change] A few people said this was a showstopper for them in recommneding Office 2007 to their customers so I figured it had to be fixed. I nixed a huge amount of work from the right stuff blog " Office 2007 File Icons for Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 " and the script work from http://blogs.msdn.com/karstenj/archive/2006/01/03/508888.aspx . The problems were: 1) no icons for files 2) file types not recognised by companyweb 3) downloads could not be opened as the file type was said to be a compressed file 4) could not edit from companyweb OK, so here is the process. 1. Download the icons from here and put them into folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\ (read the item on the the right stuff to pick your files) 2. Update the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\XML\docicon.xml file with the information below...

I think it is credit where credit is due here. The community is slowly resolving the issues we are seeing with Office 2007. I have asked John to log a call with Microsoft so that we can track the issues internally, get bugs issued and get fixes out there. Because any fix we produce has to go through threat modeling and regression testing, we rarely release them with haste unless they are impacting a significant number of users or are a security threat. However, John has documented many of the problems and solutions, so it is worth a look Problem with Outlook 2007 - Email Receive is Broken! 19 February 2007 As people start to use Outlook 2007, there is an alarming pattern starting to emerge regarding performance issues when receiving POP3 email. Even the smallest and most trivial of emails can take ages to download and be available, ranging from 30 seconds to minutes. During this time, Outlook and Windows can become slow to respond or become completely unresponsive, usually returning to normal when the send/receive...

As most of you know I am working on my Windows Intune book and I've just finished the 6th chapter. This covers reporting and I was highly frustrated that there is no export or print function on all the hardware information screens, but you can export some of the hardware information. Here is how to do it: Open the Windows Intune Console by going to http://manage.microsoft.com . Select the Computers workspace and find the computer that whose hardware inventory we want to explore or store. Change the Filters setting from None to Hardware classification . We will now see the information about the hardware manufactures and model. If the machine is a non-OEM system then we will see the motherboard manufacturer and model number. We can export this data using the export logo in the top right of the tool bar next to the printer icon. We are prompted to choose between csv (comma separated values) and html files. Only csv files are useful for importing into custom reports. Select .csv File and then press Export . Once...

I was recently asked by someone how to do this. Considering the fact that there are pre-defined public folders in SBS, including those for contacts I thought it was worth sharing this with a wider audience. Set this up for a customer using SBS and they can easily share contacts across the whole business. Add the contacts folder to the favourties list and they are also cached offline :-) I found the answer by experimentation, but then this article describes it well too. The magic tab in Office 2007 (and 2003) is pictured below from my system. How to add Public Folder Contacts to the list of Address Books First thing you need to make sure that the public folders has a contact list created. Also, double check the permissions so that your users can view the contact list. To setup the Contact List in the Address Book navigate to your public folder and find the contact list you want to add. Right-click on the Contacts Folder and click properties . Click on the Outlook Address Book tab. Check the box next to “Show...

One of the settings I wanted to change in SBS 2008 was the spam filter settings – some mails that I was receiving were being deleted without any option for me to review them. Since I had to go and read the manual on this, I thought I would share the answer on this. Open the Exchange Management Console Select the Organization Configuration and then Hub Transport Select the Anti-spam and look at Content Filtering By default the “Reject messages” SCL rating is set to 7. I change this to 8, enable "Quarantining messages” for messages above a level of 6 Finally, you need to enter the e-mail of a mailbox to receive the quarantined e-mail You can see how this impacted the e-mails themselves in the daily report – notice the number of mails still rejected / quarantined: That is it. See all the other SBS 2008 items at http://davidoverton.com/blogs/doverton/archive/tags/SBS+2008/default.aspx ttfn David Technorati Tags: Microsoft , SBS , SBS 2008 , Small Business Server 2008 , Exchange 2007 , Tips , Spam , Content Filtering

So you may remember the call for help that led to the article How to add public folders to the list of contacts in Outlook : We currently have several public folders which contain email address and contact information for people outside of our company that we want to keep up with. I would like to put these in the All Contacts list on the server, so everyone can open it and reference it when sending email. The only thing I can find it to put them in Active Directory so they can be on the list. Surely there is another way to get this done, but how. I also am not opposed to manually typing them in (and weeding out old contacts), but don't feel very comfortable putting 800 outsiders in my AD. Having proposed the solution in the above link, I then got back the following reply: Thanks David for the reply. I have some address books in the public folder that I have done that to, but was trying to move away from the public folder and have the addresses included in the "All Contacts" under the "All Addresses" section for...