|
Greetings! Welcome to Vol. 7, No. 7, 12 Aug 2002, of Exchange Messaging
Outlook, a biweekly newsletter about Microsoft Exchange and
Microsoft Outlook.
Today's highlights:
- SP2 causes problems for some Outlook 2002 users on Windows XP
- Office XP SP2 and Norton Antivirus
- Send HTML messages with bookmarks
- Office and Visual Studio .NET
SP2 causes problems for some Outlook 2002 users on Windows XP
As reported in the last EMO issue, some Outlook 2002 users are
having problems after applying Office Service Pack 2. The typical
scenario is that Outlook crashes when it seems to be sitting idle
doing nothing or when you exit Outlook. Sometimes it offers to send
an error report to Microsoft and leaves an entry in the event log.
In other cases, Outlook just shuts down without any warning or error
message.
We heard from Microsoft today that they have narrowed down the
problem to users with POP3 accounts running Outlook 2002 on Windows
XP and that a fix is in development. That diagnosis fits with my
hypothesis -- that it's related to background scheduled send/receive
sessions.
If you have already installed Outlook 2002 and have this problem,
try turning off background send/receive: Choose Tools |
Send/Receive Settings | Define Send/Receive Groups. For each
group, clear the Schedule an automatic send/receive boxes.
Another workaround may be to install Windows XP Service Pack 1,
which was released earlier this week --
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/servicepacks/sp1/default.asp
. Many, but not all, people who have reported the Outlook problem in
the newsgroups say installing Windows XP SP1 resolved the issue.
However, you might want to wait a few days to see what problems
surface with the Windows service pack itself
If you are anxious about installing SP2 but don't have Windows
XP, it looks like the coast is clear. We haven't seen any notable
problem reports related to earlier operating systems.
Office XP SP2 and Norton Antivirus
A broader problem with Office documents and SP2 has already
triggered a Microsoft Knowledgebase article. The chief symptom is a
"File ... is not available" error message when opening embedded
Office documents. The KB article " OFFXP Cannot Edit Inserted
Objects After You Install Office XP Service Pack 2" at
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q328613
explains that the disabling the Norton Antivirus Plug-in for
Microsoft Office should solve the problem. You can still scan
documents manually for viruses or rely on normal automatic file
scans as documents are saved to your system.
Send HTML messages with bookmarks
Many thanks to Stephen Green for pointing out yet another method
of sending relatively complex HTML messages with internal bookmarks
via Outlook. His technique is to create an HTML document in
Microsoft FrontPage, then use FrontPage's File | Send
command. (We tried this in Office XP, but not Office 2000 yet.) The
resulting message will include an extraneous two line feeds and
horizontal line at the top, but you can easily delete these.
Be careful with your <img> tags if you use this method, because
the message uses the exact tag from your document, even if you have
Outlook set to embed images in outgoing HTML messages. Therefore,
the <img> tags will need to point to files available on the
Internet. This, in turn, may annoy people who use dial-up Internet
connections, since Outlook will try to connect to try to display the
images when the recipient opens or previews the message.
For more ideas on generating fancy HTML for Outlook messages, see
http://www.slipstick.com/mail1/html.htm.
Office and Visual Studio .NET
Microsoft last month outlined its development plans for next
three versions of Visual Studio between now and 2004 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/roadmap.asp).
For Outlook developers, the most interesting version is Visual
Studio for Yukon, which promises to deliver support in the Visual
Studio development environment for Office development, while
continuing support for Visual Basic for Applications. Since Office
11 is nearing beta -- Outlook 11 will be demonstrated at MEC next
month -- and should be nearly feature-complete, I think that means
that you'll see full .NET + Office development in Office 12, not 11.
Currently, the best source of information on developing for
Outlook with .NET is at
http://www.microeye.com/resources/index.html. There are
definitely some sticky issues -- such as creating a shim to allow
you to build a COM add-in that can be trusted with the Admin Pack
for the Outlook 2002. |
RSS
