Kale Davis » Office

Not so Live Meeting, Update

Kale — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 07:48:40 +0000

I’ve posted before about our issues with the Live Meeting Add-in Pack and Outlook 2007, so when I received this from Live Meeting support a week ago I was hoping for the best:

This issue has been identified at the this time and is being tested and reviewed for inclusion at the earliest possible date. The escalation to the development team will remain open and active until work is completed on the issue however this support ticket will close.

Well, I never heard back from them, but tonight I noticed that the published date on the Download details page was changed to 3/20/2007 and it lists Office 2007 as an option under Application Requirements. I can’t test it from my home Linux box, but will update this tomorrow after I test it. Hopefully the add-in pack with Outlook 2007 will become “Live” and usable.

Updated 3/21/2007 – The update appears to fix the Outlook 2007 issue in my testing. Also, you can check out this Readme for all the issues that were fixed.

The exception unknown software exception (a.k.a. SysFader)

Kale — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 21:01:40 +0000

Update 7/10/07: kerwin left a comment about a new KB article and hotfix that Microsoft just released. We tested it yesterday on a machine with both 2003 and 2007 Office components and it seemed to fix the error. Note that although both the article and hotfix specify WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007, it also should work with 2.0/2003 (which makes sense, this is a client issue). Thanks kerwin for the information and to all the other people who left helpful comments.

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You have to enjoy that helpful IE7 error message right? This past Monday I started getting an error everytime I tried to open an Office document from SharePoint 2003 (to be specific, a WSS 2.0 Team Site).

The exact error was:

SysFader: iexplore.exe – Application Error : The exception unknown software exception (0xc06d007f) occurred in the application at location 0x7c812a5b.

After some searching, I found only one related link on SharePoint University that was close to what I was seeing. It wasn’t much help and basically said to reload XP, not the solution I was looking for. I then started looking into the IE7 add-ons (Internet Options -> Programs -> Manage add-ons) and disabled the SharePoint ones I found. That fixed it! Seems like the SharePoint OpenDocuments Class was causing the error. With it disabled I was able to open the document, however it reduced the functionality of the drop down by removing the “Edit with…” option.

After a search for SharePoint OpenDocuments Class I found the answers in several blogs (Outlook by the sound, Shaune Donohue, and Michael Becker). The issue is conflicting versions of the OWSSUPP.DLL file because you have both Office11 and Office12 installed. You can check for these two folders in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office. I had both because I had installed Visio and Project 2007 while still running 2003 for the rest of the suite. I renamed the Office12 version (once I am off of Office 2003 I will change this back) and enabled the add-on and everything works great.

The funny part is none of these blogs mentioned the error message (maybe they were getting a different one?), so I couldn’t find them on my initial search. Hopefully this post will be the “bridge” for others who get this annoying error message so that you can find the easy fix. The only question that remains is what changed to start causing this (I’ve had Visio 2007 installed for at least five months). If I find the answer to that I will update this or if you know please leave a comment.

Not so Live Meeting

Kale — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 08:46:40 +0000

One of my side projects this year was helping our department role out Microsoft Live Meeting. I will write more about that fun [sic] project later, but for now I wanted to see if others were having the same issue with Outlook 2007 that we are. It seems that some users still have the Live Meeting add-in pack toolbar and buttons in Outlook 2007 and some users don’t. Even after a reinstall of the Live Meeting add-in pack they still no luck getting it to reappear.

I was pretty surprised with the response I got back from the Live Meeting support team:

Thank you for your inquiry regarding compatibility issues with Live Meeting and Office 2007. Unfortunately, Live Meeting is not fully compatible with any Office 2007 software since Office 2007 is still considered a beta product at this time. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

That is pretty funny since I opened this ticket on December 1st, the day after the Office 2007 launch. You would think that Microsoft would test their own products with the betas? With Live Meeting the answer is no.

Free E-book: First Look – 2007 Microsoft Office Systems

Kale — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 01:18:22 +0000

Free book from Microsoft about the new Office 2007 suite. ~5MB download, 213 pages.