It's almost here. According to the latest Technet Flash newsletter,
Exchange Server 2007 with Service Pack 1 will be available for
download on November 30, 2007.
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Outlook developer Ken Slovak has been working with Microsoft to
determine the cause of a bad crash in Outlook 2007 (and hangs on
Outlook 2003) caused by Apple's ITunes add-in for Outlook which
is used for calendar synching with IPods. Ken felt our readers
would find this information useful and interesting.
Because other vendors are using the same method ITunes uses,
there are other add-ins which will need to be fixed. We're
hoping by publishing the problem, vendors will check their code
and address the problem.
From Ken: "According to a Microsoft support engineer, Outlook
was designed to assume that all calls to the Outlook object
model are on thread 0. Some other often used DLL's also make
that assumption, such as the VB 6 runtime (MSVBVM60.DLL) which
is used in many of the Outlook add-ins currently available.
Apple sets up a new thread using a named pipe to do the calendar
synching but neglected to marshal the thread back to thread 0
for any calls to the Outlook object model and calls into the
object model instead on thread 7. This lack of a proxying back
to thread 0 then sets Outlook to call into MSVBVM60 to pass
along any events that have fired due to the object model access
(for example the ItemLoad event available only in Outlook 2007,
which fires on every object model access to any Outlook item).
This crashes Outlook due to the threading. The stack is read by
Watson and whatever is at the bottom of the stack gets blamed
for the crash, usually MSVBVM60 but also Kernel32 on Vista. The
next time Outlook starts up, whichever add-in was listed lowest
in the stack is blamed for the crash.
If no VB6 add-in is running then Outlook doesn't immediately
crash, instead it becomes unstable and might crash at any later
time, or it might just get hung in a deadlock between threads,
something that won't happen if all calls to the object model are
called in thread 0.
There is no possible defensive programming an add-in can do to
prevent another add-in from causing this problem. The problem
add-in must change its code to prevent the problem from
occurring."
Ken's contact at Microsoft is in touch with Apple about the
problem and we fully expect Apple to fix the problems. However,
other vendors are also doing the same thing and causing
problems, so this is a vendor by vendor problem that needs to be
addressed each time an offending add-in is discovered.
Ken adds "One way users can figure out which add-in is causing
the crashes is to disable all add-ins except the one being
blamed for the crash, then re-enable them one by one and waiting
for the crash to occur. When it does, you know which add-in
caused it. Getting the vendor to fix the problem may be more
difficult."
Steve Griffin plans to write about the problem on his blog and
will eventually get the information into the new Outlook 2007
Auxiliary Reference documentation, which is the best the site to
visit to reference best practices and to aid developers whose
add-ins are incorrectly being blamed for crashes. Microsoft may
contact vendors who show up in the Watson bucket crashes; Steve
has already identified at other vendors, aside from Apple, who
are showing up in those buckets.
SGriffin's [MSFT] WebLog
http://blogs.msdn.com/stephen_griffin/default.aspx
Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Auxiliary Reference
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb905149.aspx
An interesting problem came up in the Microsoft public
newsgroups this week. Richard posts: "We have a specific user
requirement to auto accept meeting requests only from some
selected organizers, but I don't see any choice in Rule Wizard
for meeting requests. Does anyone have an idea, please?"
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Antivirus for Exchange Server comes in two different
flavors, file-level antivirus and information-store antivirus.
More than likely, the antivirus package you purchase will
provide these capabilities as separate options.
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