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Access keys provide a way to quickly use a command by pressing a few keys, no matter where you are in the program. Every command in Office Word 2007 can be accessed by using an access key. You can get to most commands by using two to five keystrokes. To discover and use an access key: [more]

1. Press ALT while in MS Word 2007 and the KeyTips will be displayed over each feature that is available in the current view.
   
   The above image was excerpted from Training on Microsoft Office Online.
2. Press the letter shown in the KeyTip over the feature that you want to use.
3. Depending on which letter you press, you may be shown additional KeyTips. For example, if the tab is active and you press I, the tab is displayed, along with the KeyTips for the groups on that tab.
4. Continue pressing letters until you press the letter of the command or control that you want to use. In some cases, you must first press the letter of the group that contains the command.
5. To cancel the action that you are taking and hide the KeyTips, press ALT.

Somehow directories get set with a read-only attribute that cannot be changed with the GUI.  Use attrib -r to remove the read only attribute.  If a directory where VMware stores snapshots is set to read only, VMware cannot restore snapshots from that directory.  See http://support.microsoft.com/?id=326549 and http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=339508.  It seems if you customize the folder to get the fancy VMware icon on it, then Windows sets the read only attribute on the folder.  Then at some random time in the future, VMware will not be able to restore a snapshot.

We recently ran across a problem where users trying to log on to Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access in Exchange Server 2007 would receive the following error message:
"A problem occurred while trying to use your mailbox. Please contact technical support for your organization."

If Show Details is clicked in this error message, a call stack including the following message appears:
"Exception message: Property Languages cannot be set on this object because it requires the object to have version 0.1 (8.0.535.0) or later. Current version of the object is 0.0 (6.5.6500.0)." [more]

After some research we found that this issue occurs when the msExchVersion attribute is not set correctly on the user object in the Active Directory. Exchange 2007 uses the msExchVersion attribute to determine the version of Exchange that user objects are associated with. If the version value is less than 0.1, Exchange 2007 considers the object "read-only" and cannot write changes to the object.

The msExchVersion attribute may not set correctly if you created the user's mailbox by using the Active Directory Users and Computers Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in instead of by using the Exchange 2007 Management Console, as was the case in this situation. 

To resolve this issue, type the following command at the Exchange Management Shell prompt:
Set-Mailbox User_Name -ApplyMandatoryProperties

To verify the msExchVersion attribute, type the following command at the Exchange Management Shell prompt:
Get-Mailbox User_Name | format-list ExchangeVersion

I have developed a new extension for the BlogEngine.NET platform.  It's basically an enhanced version of the BreakPost extension.  It works the same as BreakPost in that you insert "[more]" in the post body where you would like it to break and display a link to the full post.  However, I added a couple new features. 

PostTeaser differs from the BreakPost extension in that it ensures all tags opened before the [more] are closed, so that the post body is still valid XHTML even after it is truncated.  I was having problems with BreakPost not closing my paragraph tags and throwing off my layout, because it was doing a simple substring. 

I also made PostTeaser display the post teasers in the RSS feed the same way that it does for the post list on the default page. 

Click the link below to download the PostTeaser Extension.

PostTeaser.zip

We were having some problems getting Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) to download new updates at one of our customer's sites.  The ISA server was denying the connections, but was saying that "an existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host".  I made several changes on the ISA server to try to fix this.  I tried using an HTTP rule without the web proxy, disabled caching, etc.  Nothing seemed to fix the problem.  When I checked the Application event log on the server, there was a WSUS error saying, "Content file download failed. Reason: The server does not support the necessary HTTP protocol. Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) requires that the server support the Range protocol header."  I did some research on this and found a fix that involved making a change to the WSUS database. [more]

I stopped the WSUS service and ran the following command:
osql.exe -S PNB-TS\MICROSOFT##SSEE -E -b -n -Q "USE SUSDB update tbConfigurationC set BitsDownloadPriorityForeground=1"

I then restarted the service and it worked great.

Microsoft has changed the query syntax for creating Exchange Address Lists and Email Address Policies in Exchange 2007. In Exchange 2003, all recipient filters were created with LDAP queries. In Exchange 2007, a new filter syntax called OPATH has been introduced. OPATH is easier to write and makes queries easier to understand, but any ALs or EAPs that are carried over as part of a migration from Exchange 2k/2k3 to 2k7 must be updated to use OPATH instead of LDAP. Here is an example of such a conversion:

LDAP: 
(&(&(&(&(mailnickname=*)(|(&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user)(|(homeMDB=*)(msExchHomeServerName=*))))))
(objectCategory=user)(physicalDeliveryOfficeName=morton*)))

OPATH:
( ( ( Alias -ne $null ) -and ( ( ObjectCategory -like 'person' ) -and ( ObjectClass -eq 'user' ) -and ( recipientType -eq 'UserMailbox' ) ) ) -and ( ObjectCategory -like 'user' ) -and ( Office -like 'morton*' ) )

To save a lot of time by avoiding doing these conversions by hand you can use the LDAP to OPATH filter conversion script script provided by the Microsoft Exchange Team.

We were trying to update Symantec Mail Security (SMS) for SMTP from v4.0 to v4.1 and the upgrade routine seemed to hang during the ‘Java Liveupdate’ portion.  Server hard-drive activity was heavy at that point and Task Mgr showed the upgrade ‘running’, but we did not seem to be making progress.  We installed a Java-runtime update and found a Symantec Java-liveupdate hotfix, but we ran out of time and had to leave the server @ v4.0  We went back on site Monday ready to uninstall Java Liveupdate, but the add/remove routine behaved similarly – heavy drive paging and the routine showed running, but no progress was occurring (waited 15 minutes).  I found a symantec procedure to manually remove Java Liveupdate and was going thru that, deleting folders, when I came upon ‘C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Java Liveupdate’  Before deleting it, I looked inside – it had 1 folder called ‘downloads’, which contained approx 21,000 pattern update folders going back to 2004.  I deleted all these subfolders, which took about 25 minutes.  After that completed, I re-ran the v4.1 upgrade, which ran thru with no problems.  Whether it was the upgrade routine or Jave Liveupdate uninstall, the server was obviously trying to process all these subfolders and choking on them (might have eventually completed if given long enough).  So, when working with Java Liveupdate, it is probably a good idea to look for this downloads folder first and clear it out.

A task to have standard Outlook signatures started me on a Google search.  I found solutions for setting up the signature on each user’s computer for small companies as well as some applications for sale that would allow you to tweak Outlook for larger companies.  What I ended up doing was taking a snapshot of a VM machine before and after I applied the signature.  I then used WinInstall LE to find what changes occurred to the system between the before and after snapshot.  The actual signature is saved in three formats (html, rich text, and plain text) in %UserProfile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures.  A personal profile configuration file (*.pip) is also changed in Outlook called MSOut11.pip.  This file is located at %UserProfile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Office.  By modifying the three signature files for each user, and adding these files to the user’s profile, you can create a standard signature for anyone in a company. 

Disclaimer: This currently has only been tested in a terminal server environment running Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Office 2003.

When restoring a Microsoft Exchange 2003 database, be sure an actual database file exists to restore to.  A restoration of the Exchange Information Store is not a file restore, so the files already need to be in place.  Beginning from scratch in a disaster recovery scenario, you will need to:

• Install Exchange (since the Exchange installation directories should not be included as part of the file system restore)
• Patch Exchange with the same Service Packs and Patches that were previously installed
• Mount the Information Store (empty at the time) – this will create the necessary empty databases
• Dismount the Information Store (and set it to be able to overwritten by a restore procedure)
• Run the recovery of the information store