Microsoft Equipt – Annual Subscription License

…an Office Home & Student shopping gotcha is that at Circuit City (and only Circuit City) they sell a annual subscription version called Microsoft Equipt. It’s Office Home and Student 2007 & Live OneCare. The gotcha is the unique ‘annual subscription’ license and that information isn’t being made very prominent (aside from the box itself).  You are to pay an annual  $69.99 MSRP subscription to continue receiving updates and upgrades (including future versions). Also, now that Live OneCare has gone bye-bye this annual subscription has limited value going beyond the first year.

In case you aren’t familiar with Microsoft Licensing, if you aren’t licensed then you don’t legally own the rights to use the software.  In other words if you don’t pay $70/year every year of the subscription then you forfeit ownership and are no longer legally running the sofware.  Will the police be coming bye to uninstall it and fine you?  most likely not, you’ll just be on your own for support.

Since initially posting this, my colleagues have chimed in that there is a possibility that Microsoft will end this product altogether and if they do then they will convert it into a fully licensed equivalent Office product and let the Live OneCare expire at the end of its year.  There aren’t any current known Microsoft products to upgrade Live OneCare.  It should be interesting to see how beta code named “Morro” develops until its July ‘09 release.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/jul08/07-02EquiptPR.mspx

"The address list could not be displayed" error message when you use your Contacts to address a new message in Outlook

Ran across this twice recently so I’m putting it here for possible future reference.

The last troubled mailbox had somehow gotten corrupt and when trying to recover/rebuild it somehow also Outlook Address Book had gotten corrupt.  Following these instruction was a piece of cake to remove the old broken OAB and rebuild it fresh.

SYMPTOMS

If you attempt to address a new message from your Contacts, you may receive the following error message:

The address list could not be displayed. The Contacts folder associated with this address list could not be opened; it may have been moved or deleted, or you do not have permissions. For information on how to remove this folder from the Outlook Address Book, see Microsoft Outlook Help.

“The address list could not be displayed” error message when you use your Contacts to address a new message in Outlook

Community Clips – user created tutorial vid’s

The idea  behind this Microsoft innovation is that the ‘community’ uses the tool to capture and upload tutorials for sharing. Microsoft then also provides the server space to host these media clips as well as a web portal to find them.  While the pieces aren’t ground breaking, the idea of putting them all together is.  This could be an nifty online enhancement to getting and giving help.

http://communityclips.officelabs.com/Default.aspx

Recently a peer of mine, Allen Miller, was talking about another nifty screen capture tool – JISP – that he likes:

http://allenmillercomputerconsulting.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/jing-cool-screen-capturerecord/

Slooow index response = Vista & Outlook ‘07 user angst

I’ve been quietly suffering for a long while and this has affected my productivity in significant ways.  Outlook 2007 has sluggishly performed to the point of it being a half a day task to just read the incoming stuff.  Vista’s instant search became less than instant some time ago and I was worked around it using the tried and true way of typing paths or browsing trees is still as good today as it was during XP.  That doesn’t make it a smart move to ignore a festering wound though and finally it caught up to me.  So what to do?  Google “Outlook 2007 indexing Vista”.  Here’s the lifesaving gem I found:

Watch out for a Microsoft Outlook 2007 indexing issue in Windows Vista

thank you Serdar Ygulalp

 

This article provides enough of a glimpse into how Vista indexing works that I now believe their isn’t any mystery to this at all.  I’ll continue to tune my indexed locations until I get the needed performance.  I may even consider putting the index on its own drive to speed up performance.

**notice the short list of other useful related topics towards the bottom of the article

In that short list I found this standout topic: 

Troubleshoot a corrupt Outlook profile after a Vista upgrade

BCM Mastery Series #3 – Database Tool Logging

If you have used the BCM for Outlook 2007 Database Tool and it acts up this post is for you.  This isn’t exactly an exciting breakthrough and hopefully you won’t need to ever go here.  But if you do you will need this troubleshooting log file created.  By default no logging is going on so first you will need to edit your registry to get that ON.

To enable logging to collect log files for analysis, on the server
you can create the following registry key:
Registry Key: 
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Business Solutions eCRM Wizard
Dword Value Name: BCMLogging
Value Data: 255  (decimal)

This will put a log file in the temp directory named BCMLog_V3_Serverwizard.log.

“C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Temp\BCMLog_V3_serverwizard.log”

Send that to your Microsoft support guru for further analysis.

BCM Mastery Series

1. Location, Location, Location
2. BCM for Outlook 2007 Database Tool overview (being written)
3. BCM for Outlook 2007 Database Tool Logging
4. SQL Management Studio for the BCM Database (being written)
5. SQL 2005 Express Advanced installation Walk Through (being written)