In this respect, surgery is a lot like buying Microsoft licenses. As I’ve noted before, Microsoft licensing is not the easiest thing in the world to master. Several months ago, my clients happened to be buying a lot of Microsoft software, so I was right on top of the ins and outs. But this past winter and spring, I didn’t do much license purchasing and my skills got rusty. When it came time today to do a big order for Office, I was unprepared.

As I was researching the options for my client, I came across this thing called a Step-Up license. This is used to convert Office Standard or Office Small Business Edition to Office Professional Plus or Office Enterprise. I knew I had heard of this before, but I wasn’t familiar with exactly how the program worked. For example, could you buy Step-Ups at any time? Could you buy them for just some of the licenses in your agreement? Why were they listed in the Microsoft catalog as Software Assurance SKUs only, when in fact they are providing licenses for additional products?

I did what anyone would do in this situation. I Googled. I searched for office 2007 step-up license. That’s when I knew I was in trouble, because the #3 result was MY OWN DAMN BLOG. (Susan Bradley, how many times has this happened to you?) I had completely forgotten that I had gone through this exercise in August 2007 — for the same client, no less!

My point in this note is not to rant once again about Microsoft licensing — although I may do a follow-up piece once I get this order sorted out. My point is that it’s damn hard to do a lot of different things very well. Which is why the days of the true IT generalist may be numbered.

I thought that I would be using Outlook with BCM on a regular basis by now. But my plans got derailed when I ran into difficulties installing it in my own Small Business Server environment and when I got nervous about the impact it might have on synchronizing my contacts with my Windows Mobile 5 phone. So I’m afraid I can’t tell you whether this marketing move is a good, bad, or inconsequential thing for small businesses. If I hear more, I’ll pass it along.

After suffering silently with this for years (it was only a few letters to type over, after all) I finally decided to find out where this auto-correction was hidden. Because there were no misspelled words involved, I figured this had to be a grammar checker issue. So I went into Word Options, Proofing, and Settings for grammar checking. First I tried disabling the Possessives and Plurals check. That wasn’t it. Then I disabled the Punctuation check. Still no love. I concluded it had to be a spell-checker after all. So I went into the AutoCorrect options and scrolled way down to the bottom of the list to find the culprit:

I deleted the offending entry, and now I can write about your My Documents folder without interruption.

I get asked this question at least once a month, so I figured it was worth writing up here.

If Outlook loses its connection to the Exchange server for a while, it may go into Offline mode. As long as Outlook is set to work offline, you will not be able to send and receive messages in the background – you will have to hit the Send/Receive button.

To see whether Outlook is working online or offline, look in the lower right corner of the screen. If you are connected to Exchange, it will look like one of these two pictures:

(Outlook 2007)

(Outlook 2003)

If you are working offline, it will look like this:

(Outlook 2007)

(Outlook 2003)

To remedy the problem, click the arrow to the right of “Offline” and uncheck the Work Offline option:

If you are still unable to connect to the Exchange server after unchecking Work Offline, it may look like this:

If that’s the case, then the problem is more serious and you need to figure out why your computer is not communicating with the Exchange server at all.

Suggestions one and two were definitely not on track. Suggestion three was a bit problematic. How do I use the Open and Repair option for a document saved in Groove?

There may be a more elegant solution, but here’s what I did. I right-clicked on the filename in Groove and used the Copy To… option to make a copy of the document on my desktop (outside of Groove). Then I opened Word, went to the File menu, chose Open, selected the file name of the document on my desktop, clicked the down-arrow to the right of the Open button, and chose Open and Repair:

Unfortunately, I still couldn’t recover the document.  So I used the “Recover text from any file” option:

I must admit that after all these years of using Microsoft Word I had never seen much less used this feature before. It did just what it said it would do. It got my text back, but lost all the formatting. Happily, that’s all I really needed in this case. I had an earlier version of the document that was working fine and that contained all the formatting I need. This procedure allowed me to recover all the text changes I had made in the interim.

This misfortune happened to occur in a Groove workspace that, for a variety of reasons, was only available on a single computer. Of course, that’s not the norm. Under more common circumstances, I might have been able to retrieve a good copy from another computer that had the workspace. On the other hand, because Groove is designed to keep documents in sync, perhaps my corrupt copy would have overwritten all the good copies in the other workspaces before I discovered there was a problem. For that reason, it’s important to make backups of your workspaces periodically. For more on backing up Goove, see this Microsoft article. As I write this, the most recent version of that article predates the release of Office 2007 SP1, which contains the hotfix mentioned in the article.

A client asked me this question today:

In Outlook, is there a way to change the subject line when using the out
of office assistant? For instance, we have a former employee’s email
account that says she is no longer with our company but the subject line of
the emails says out of office.

The answer is yes. When you run the Out of Office Assistant (OoOA), you get this screen:

Most folks put in some text in the upper box, click OK, and are done with it. But if you are using the OoOA for some special purpose, such as announcing the permanent departure of an employee, you might want a more sophisticated response. Or you might want to let some people know you’re out of the office but not everyone. In that case, you need to create one or more rules by clicking the Add Rule button. When you click the button, you’ll get lots of choices:

In this case, we want to check the “Reply with” button and then click the Template button to create a customized reply message. Enter the desired subject line and text, but leave the To field blank:

When you’re done composing, close the window and you’ll be prompted to save your message. Click Save and/or OK enough times and you’ll be back at the OoOA screen, with your new rule in place, and you can enable the rule when ready:

Note that for your auto-replies to actually get delivered to anyone via the Internet, your Exchange administrator has to allow it. In many cases this behavior is turned off to prevent an endless loop of messages getting bounced back and forth between auto-responding servers. The settings to enable/disable out-of-office and other automated replies are set in the properties of the Exchange Global Settings / Internet Message Formats / Default:

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, you need to think very carefully about how you want your auto-responses to work. Having an out-of-office message sent to a mass mailing list is usually a big no-no. If you are thinking about using the OoOA for a departed employee, make sure that you have unsubscribed him or her from all mailing lists first.

I call it the PBSOE2K7NOPIV, which is short for Pale Blue Screen of Excel 2007 Not Opening Properly in Vista. This happens every now and then when I double-click on an Excel file in Windows Explorer to launch Excel 2007. I don’t know what causes it yet. I can almost always fix it by closing the window — there’s no close button so I have to right-click on the taskbar button and choose close — and then relaunching the file.

Next time this happens to you, just call up Microsoft tech support and tell them you got the PBSOE2K7NOPIV. They’ll know what you mean.

Now I could have made things simple. I could have bought the computers without any Office software and purchased two copies of Office Professional Plus, License plus Software Assurance. (The part numbers for this depend on how many years are left on the original agreement and whether the original agreement was pay-up-front or spread-payments. I’ll talk about the part numbers that may or may not have applied to me later on. Is anyone still with me? I’m just getting started.)

But because the customer is buying new computers, I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to buy OEM software, for reasons explained here. And that’s when I paid the ferryman.

You see, I recently learned that adding Software Assurance to an OEM copy of Microsoft Office Professional does NOT give you the same rights as buying Office Professional through volume licensing. In fact, what you end up with is something in between Office Professional and Office Standard or Small Business. Eric Ligman recently pointed this out.

What Eric didn’t mention in that blog post, but did point out in Microsoft Small Business Yahoo group in response to a comment from yours truly, is that there is still an official path from Office OEM to Office Professional Plus:

- Start with Office Small Business OEM

- Add SA within 90 days

- Add the Office Professional Step-Up license

I went to Microsoft’s license configuration tool to see if I could find part numbers for this option. I got a bit stumped at this screen:

What do they mean by “Only OEM purchases of Office 2007 Small Business or Professional Plus Edition qualify for SA renewal?” I thought there was no such thing as OEM Professional Plus.

Soldiering on, I put in quantities of 2 for both Office Small Business and Office Professional Plus from Office Small Business Edition. Because I told the configurator that I was adding these licenses into a three year pay-up-front agreement that expires in April 2009, it suggested the following products:

- W87-00364, Office Small Business English SA OLV NL 2YR Acq Y2 Addtl Prod, MSRP $478

- 269-09058, Office Pro Plus English SA Step Up OLV NL 2YR Acq Y2 Addtl Prod Office, MSRP $216

Total MSRP: $694. To that, I’d have to add the manufacturer’s price for the base package of Office Small Business, which is about $280. So now I’m up to a total price of $974. At first, this looks more expensive than the “simple” alternative of adding the volume license for Office Professional Plus: part 269-09049, Office Professional Plus English Lic/SA Pack OLV NL 2YR Acq Y2 AddProd, MSRP $758. But then I have to consider that the $280 for the OEM Office also gets me Adobe Acrobat Standard, which itself has a $300 retail value. So if I want Adobe Acrobat (which I do), then it’s $1058 for the license-only method, which is $80 more than the OEM plus add-on options.

Ah, if only it were that simple. You see, I actually went through this exercise a few months ago when I was under the possibly mistaken impression that Office Professional OEM plus SA equaled Office Professional Plus. I told my software distributor that I had Office Pro OEM and wanted to add SA. They didn’t tell me I needed W87-00364 plus 269-09058. They told me I only needed 269-09064, Office Professional Plus English SA OLV NL 2YR Acq Y2 Addtl Prod, MSRP $279. That brings the OEM option down to $559, a savings of $199 or $499 compared to the non-OEM path, depending on whether or not you count the value of Adobe Acrobat.

It appears the distributor made a mistake, but I’m not sure about that yet. I hope to get clarification next week. If they did make a mistake, then I’ll have to figure out who has to pay for it.

I have to make a decision about this pretty quickly, because the customer needs those computers. The only thing I’m sure of at this point is that whatever I do, my customer and I are going to be rather unhappy.

Although after reading this, I still have a question: Can people who buy Office Groove 2007 (retail box) or Office Enterprise (volume licensing) share data via the Internet as soon as they install Groove, or do they have to purchase GES? I have Groove 2007 through the MS Action Pack and I’ve been able to use it without purchasing additional relay services (as far as I know). Yet the blog post seems to suggest that peer-to-peer Grooving without a relay is limited to communication within a LAN. I’m confused.

Update, August 1: Ian Watkins has pointed me to the answer, found at the Microsoft Groove “How To Buy” page:

Note: Office Groove 2007, purchased as a standalone program or as part of Office Enterprise 2007, can be deployed without hosted or on-premise server infrastructure. In this configuration, users will manually create their own Office Groove 2007 accounts, which will automatically be provisioned to a Microsoft-hosted version of Groove Server Relay to enable data routing between Office Groove 2007 clients that cannot connect directly. To gain the advantages of centralized management and control of Office Groove 2007 clients, organizations require Groove Enterprise Services or Office Groove Server 2007. Organizations with large Office Groove 2007 deployments requiring directory integration, centralized auditing, network optimization, and data integration should purchase Office Groove Server 2007.