Category Archives: Applications

Outlook 2010/2007 stuck in disconnected state for one user

Ran into a problem today with an Outlook 2010 client that would not leave the “disconnected” state. I restarted the computer, verified the mailbox was still active in Exchange 2003, and verified that this problem was not effecting other users, even ones on the same PC. I tried to create a new outlook profile, but during the setup I kept getting the same error:

“Microsoft Exchange Server reported error: The server is
not available. Contact your administrator if this condition persists”

It appears that just this one user cannot connect to exchange, the way that we solved this problem was by increasing the maximum number of connections that each user can make to Exchange 2003. Follow these steps on your Exchange server:

  1. Open Regedit
  2. Navigate to HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MicrosoftExchangeIS\ParametersSystem
  3. Create a new DWORD called “Maximum Allowed Sessions Per User” and set it to decimal 64.
  4. Restart the “Microsoft Exchange Information Store” service
  5. Attempt to reconnect with the user’s outlook.

Hopefully this took care of your problem user.

 

Disable ‘A program is trying to access e-mail address information stored in Outlook…’ dialog in Outlook 2007 using group policy

I have a client with an application that requires access to their outlook inbox, the problem is that every 10 minutes the users get prompted with a message that says

‘A program is trying to access e-mail address information stored in Outlook. If this is unexpected, click Deny and verify your antivirus software is up-to-date.

For more information about e-mail safety and how you might be able to avoid getting this warning, click Help.

Allow access for ____________’

Normally you’d not want to disable this warning, but my users are locked into a internet disabled Terminal Services environment, and they don’t need to worry about this. I wanted to disable this warning for all of them at once, so a GPO was in order.

Here is how you can disable it for all users at once:

  1. First, download and install the Office 2007 ADM templates from here.
  2. Extract them to your Domain controller, and then open Group Policy Management Console.
  3. Create a new GPO and link it to the OU containing the user accounts in question
  4. Right click the new Policy and click “Edit…”
  5. Expand User Configuration > Administrative Templates
  6. Right click on Administrative Templates and select “Add/Remove Templates…”
  7. Click “Add…”
  8. Browse to the directory where you extracted the ADM files and then select ‘outlk12.adm’. Click Open. Click ‘Close’.
  9. Expand Administrative Templates > Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 > Security >
  10. Double Click on ‘Programmatic Access Security’
  11. Set it to ‘Enabled’ and then select ‘Never warn me about suspicious activity (not recommended)’
  12. Close the GPO and Exit GPMC.msc.

Thats it, outlook will now suppress the warning and allow access to the application requesting access to the user’s outlook information.

Outlook 2010 running on Windows 7 locks up when trying to access a .PST on a network share

You may also notice that windows explorer also locks up when trying to work with the same .pst files, even when not using Outlook.

We’ve been seeing this a lot lately. Outlook 2010 on Windows 7, mostly x86, locks up completely when trying access .pst files that have been placed into re-directed My Documents folders. We used to do this a lot for folks back when we were running XP/2003, and although it was never officially supported by Microsoft, it worked out pretty well. After all who wants to lose locally stored archive files when a PC’s hard drive dies? Not me that’s for sure, which is why it makes sense to stick them out on a network share somewhere. Because email is private you don’t want to be sticking these files out where just anyone can grab them so we ended up just placing them into re-directed My Documents folders, the permissions were already in place and it just made sense. Flash forward, and now we’re upgrading PCs(well replacing actually) to Windows 7 and all of a sudden we’ve got lots of users unable to access their archive files.

The problem appears to be in Windows 7’s offline folders functionality. There are two solutions that we’ve come up with so far:

1) Disable offline folders for the affected PCs.

2) Move the .pst files to another share, and disable caching on that share. The only problem with this is when users are disconnected from the share they’ll get error messages in outlook saying that it can’t access the archive files.

I wish I had a better solution at this point but I don’t. I’ll update again if I can figure out a better way to solve this, feel free to throw your suggestions at me if you’ve got something that works and is more flexible.

Configuring Outlook Archives & Auto-Archive the correct way

I’m always getting yelled at for setting up Auto-Archive the wrong way, it’s not because I don’t know how to do it, and it’s not that the items that I set out to archive don’t go where they are supposed to, it’s that the NEXT time any archive is run, Outlook chooses to use a new file, in the default location. This may be fine for you, but most admins prefer that these archives be stored on a share, or somewhere else that’s easy to back up.

And this is where you say, well use a GPO. The problem with that is a lot of the time not every user will want the same settings, or same location for their archive, and some users are really good at keeping their inbox clean, so why force them to archive old items?

Figure 1

Anyway here is the long and short of getting Outlook to archive items to a manually created Archive file on a network share, and getting it to continue to use that same archive file for future archives:

  1. Open Outlook and Right-Click on any folder in your Inbox and select “Properties” from the menu.
  2. Click the “AutoArchive Tab”.
  3. Change your selection to “Archive items in this folder using the default settings” and then click the button for “Default Archive Settings”. See Figure 1.
  4. Configure Outlook’s default settings and file location based on your preference.  See Figure 2. When done, click the “OK” button in the AutoArchive window.
  5. Click CANCEL on the original window, so that these settings are not applied to any or all of your outlook inbox folders. Now you can either configure thesettings on the proper folders, or run a one time archive from the file menu, and

    Figure 2

    be certain that the archived mail will go to the correct location

    Using this method the chances of a user ending up with 15 archive files, located on both network and local storage are minimized, however, if you want to make sure that archived mail is never lost, you should use a GPO and control where mail is stored and when it’s archived using policy.

Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 / 10.1 Beeps and skips a word when using Terminal Services

We have a client that uses Dragon Naturally Speaking 10.1 for Medical Practices. They ran into a problem that when a user was using Dragon, and had an open Remote Desktop Connection to a terminal server, Dragon would beep and then skip one or more words before continuing to transcribe.

After considerable testing we were able to verify that this only happens when the user has and open RDP connection, and the focus is in that RDP session.

This problem was resolved by editing a file called “nsapps.ini” that’s located in “c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\nuance\NaturallySpeaking10\

The following 2 lines were added to the file:
[MSTSC]
Key Delay=1

Once these changes were made, I restarted Dragon Naturally Speaking and was able to have the user test the software, there were no beeps, and no missed words, but there was a small keystroke delay between when the user stopped talking, and when Dragon transcribed the text.

Creating a new Outlook 2011 Profile (Identity )

The first thing to remember is Outlook 2011 is the first Outlook version on Mac, it’s a replacement for Entourage, so when searching for how to create a new Profile, you’re really searching for how to create a new Identity, that’s what Entourage used to call them. If you’re coming from a Windows environment (like me) then you’ll just be calling it a Profile, but that’s why you’ve ended up at my post instead of somewhere else, you’re calling it by the wrong name.

Whatever you want to call it, you can change it and Delete it by going to the following location:
Open Finder
Click on Applications
Open the folder "Office 2011"
Open the folder "Add-ins"
Open the "Microsoft Database Utility"

You can use the Plus and Minus at the bottom to add new or remove Identities (Profiles) for Outlook 2011