HowTo-Outlook

Archive 50

Lee Derbyshire wrote an article over at msexchange.org – on how to create your custom Exchange 2003 OWA themes. To make this more fun, we made the files needed for XBOX-inspired OWA theme available here.

View/Download: Exchange 2003 OWA XBOX theme, anyone?

This add-in provides you with all the tools you need to create, update, and manage a fully-powered e-commerce Web site. After you install the add-in, all you need to do is sign up for a Microsoft bCentral™ Commerce Manager account, create a product catalog, run the E-commerce Wizard, and customize your Web site to suit your needs.

Download: FrontPage 2003, 2002, and 2000 Add-in Version 2- bCentral Commerce Manager

Outlook has got many icons to indicate something about a mail. You probably already know the closed envelope, the open envelop, marked as forwarded, marked as replied and if you are in an Exchange organization the Out of Office icon probably looks familiar as well. I’ve been asked several times before what a specific icon means. Since then I really started to look at them and collect them (it’s bit like collecting stamps right?)… for you of course and to write a guide on it!

Well it’s finished now and you can see the list of icons and their meaning by clicking the link below.

Although these are Outlook 2003 icons I’m sure you’ll recognize the icons for your version of Outlook.

View: What do the Outlook Icons Mean?

Microsoft is trotting out new pricing options for its hosted Live Meeting Web conferencing.

Added to the mix are new named-user and conference room models. In the former, companies pay for individuals who then can have as many meetings as they want with up to 15 participants, according to Jennifer Callison, director of product management. Pricing starts at $180 per person for the standard edition or $300 per person for the professional edition which adds application sharing, handouts and recordings to the mix.

The limited-room model for 15 meetings per month starts at $200 per seat per year. An unlimited option covers as many meetings as needed and starts at $600 per seat per year.

Finally, a new monthly minutes option will let users sign up for a block of time each month and get higher discounts the more they use the service. Callison likened this to a cell phone usage plan minus the penalties for overuse.

View full article: Microsoft Opens Up Live Meeting Options

If you’re sick of spam, imagine wading through dozens of prerecorded porn and Viagra messages on your voice mail.

Some computer security and privacy experts are warning that such a day may not be far off for customers of new Internet phone services, which marry the immediacy of a voice call with the conveniences–and inconveniences–of e-mail.

That could be unwelcome news for those who believe telemarketing is already so bad it can’t possibly get any worse.
“The fear with VoIP spam is you will have an Internet address for your phone number, which means you can use the same tools you use for e-mail to generate traffic, said Tom Kershaw, a vice president at security specialist VeriSign. “That raises automation to scary degrees.”

View full article: Net phone customers brace for ‘VoIP spam’

This download enables you to select an area of text within Word 2003 or PowerPoint 2003 to convert it from Cyrillic script to Latin script or vice-versa. This can be also be used for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 when Word 2003 is used as the e-mail editor.

Download: Office 2003 Add-in: Latin and Cyrillic Transliteration

A security issue has been identified that could allow an attacker to run programs and access data on a computer running Microsoft® Exchange Server 5.5. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft.

Download: Security Update for Exchange 5.5 (KB842436)

Download the construction information update to keep the road construction projects information of your maps current in Streets and Trips.
Save the file in the Data folder, located where you installed the program files for MapPoint or Streets & Trips. I.e. C:\Program Files\Microsoft MapPoint\Data\

Download: MapPoint 2001 and Streets and Trips 2001 Construction Update
Download: MapPoint 2002 and Streets and Trips 2002 Construction Update
Download: MapPoint 2003 and Streets and Trips 2003 Construction Update
Download: MapPoint 2004 and Streets and Trips 2004 Construction Update

Well that is if you have the English or German version of Windows XP installed. The download is the full version which also upgrades your Tablet PC and Media Center Edition. All other languages will be made available within 2 months. So keep checking Windows Update as well!

Download: Windows XP Service Pack 2 Network Installation Package

Currently only to the ones who have been Beta testing it (for so long) and the MSDN subscribers. Keep an eye on Windows Update!

Update: The official message has gone out now as well;

Microsoft Releases Windows XP Service Pack 2 with Advanced Security Technologies to Computer Manufacturers
Microsoft Corp. today announced the release to manufacturing of Windows® XP Service Pack 2 with Advanced Security Technologies. This free service pack delivers the latest security updates and innovations from Microsoft, establishes strong default security settings, and adds new proactive protection features that will help better safeguard computers from hackers, viruses and other security risks.

“Service Pack 2 is a significant step in delivering on our goal to help customers make their PCs better isolated and more resilient in the face of increasingly sophisticated attacks,” said Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect at Microsoft. “It is the result of sustained investments in innovation and extensive industry collaboration. It also reflects a broad recognition that as the security environment changes, the industry needs to work together to respond.”

During the worldwide rollout of Service Pack 2, Microsoft will localize the software in 25 languages over the next two months and distribute it to computer manufacturers, enterprise customers and consumers through downloads, retail installation, free CDs and on new PCs. The easiest way for current Windows XP users to ensure they receive Service Pack 2 when it releases in their language is to simply turn on the Automatic Updates feature in Windows XP.

View full Press Release: Microsoft Releases Windows XP Service Pack 2 with Advanced Security Technologies to Computer Manufacturers

The CHM provides an overview of the FabriKam project and how to use the FabriKam virtual PC environment and documentation to best learn about the rich potential of the Microsoft Office System as a development platform. Each solution and platform component section described the salient points that help developers focus on areas of interest.

Download: Office 2003 Tool: FabriKam – The Microsoft Office System Solutions Learning Platform

The numbers don’t lie: CAN-SPAM is a bust.

Compliance with CAN-SPAM has fallen to a new low, according to recent data collected by MX Logic.

In July, compliance fell for the first time under one percent to a measly 0.54 percent of all unsolicited commercial mail the company sampled during the month.

The Denver-based firm has been tracking compliance with CAN-SPAM since the federal law went on the books in January. Through April, MX Logic’s numbers remained stable, with about three percent of spam messages complying with the law’s requirements, which range from verifiable return addresses to measures consumers and businesses can use to opt out of mailing lists. In May and June, however, the number slipped to one percent.

“Now it’s been halved,” said Steve Ruskin, a senior analyst at MX Logic. “No one’s really sure what’s going on, but it’s clear that CAN-SPAM isn’t a threat to spammers. They’re just ignoring it.”

View full article: CAN-SPAM Big Bust

The Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 Software Development Kit (SDK) is designed for solution providers (SPs), value-added resellers (VARs), and other developers who are interested in developing solutions with InfoPath 2003 and InfoPath 2003 Service Pack 1.

The InfoPath SDK includes documentation and samples that demonstrate development techniques for customizing and implementing InfoPath features, including integration with Microsoft Office Access 2003, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft BizTalk Server, Microsoft SQL Server, XML Web Services, Component Object Model (COM) components, and ActiveX Data Objects (ADO).

Download: InfoPath 2003 Software Development Kit

Live Communications Server 2003 Document: Release Notes 1.0c
The Release Notes Update contains new information for Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003 Standard Edition.

Live Communications Server 2003 FAQ and Troubleshooting Guide
This frequently asked questions (FAQ) and troubleshooting guide provides answers and insights to some of the most relevant questions about Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003.

Microsoft this week chopped the price of its OneNote note-taking application. The software, one of several new applications released last year under the Office umbrella, will now sell for $100, half the original price. Microsoft had provided widespread $100 rebates, however.

OneNote is a collection of tools for organizing information from various sources. The application has been targeted mainly at college students and owners of devices based on Microsoft’s Tablet PC format, which can utilize OneNote’s built-in handwriting recognition.

View: Microsoft cuts OneNote price

Use "PFHTO781" to get a discount when ordering!

Archive 49

Opinion: David Coursey shares his wishlist of features he’d like to see in the next release of Microsoft Outlook.

You’d think that by now Microsoft Outlook would be a pretty complete product. And it generally is, except that it doesn’t do a number of things that it really ought to. Like these dozen features that are on my list for the next release of Bill’s Chosen E-Mail Client. I wonder how my list matches up against yours:

1. Address correction and validation: The United States Postal Service likes to see addresses presented in certain ways, with specific abbreviations and nine-digit ZIP codes. Why doesn’t Outlook automatically validate the addresses in my contact list, fix nonstandard abbreviations, and add ZIP codes and the extra four digits as needed?

View full article: A Dozen Things Outlook Doesn’t Do—but Should

This book discusses how, when using S/MIME, encryption protects the contents of e-mail messages and digital signatures verify the identity of a purported sender of an e-mail message. In addition, this book provides guidance on how to implement S/MIME with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. In addition, this book provides guidance and pointers to other resources where those are necessary.

Download: Exchange Server 2003 Message Security Guide

In its campaign to hit spammers where they feel it — in their pocketbooks — Microsoft has filed 60 lawsuits over the past two years, using state and federal statutes against bulk e-mailers operating from distant points around the country.
So investigators were surprised last year when the path of one case involving spam linked to a pornographic British site led back to private mailboxes in Kirkland, practically under the shadow of Microsoft’s Redmond campus.

Those mailboxes, Microsoft investigators say, belonged to a number of interlinked companies that the porn site was registered to. Jason Cazes of Kirkland was the director or part owner of many of the companies.

View full article: Microsoft Attacks Spam in Courts

Microsoft Indonesia will launch the Indonesian version of Microsoft Office, which includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook, late this year, its president director, Tony Chen, said here Tuesday.

“We will promote (the new program) to the public late this year,” he said.

The new application was made following studies on the need for Microsoft Office in Bahasa Indonesia, he said, adding that the application is Microsoft Indonesia`s initiative to empower the use of Indonesian software.

View: Microsoft to Launch Indonesian Version of Microsoft Office

As Microsoft looks at offering tailored, market-specific Office System products, this fall it will release in Japan a new product called Microsoft Office Interconnect, currently under beta testing, that is essentially a contact manager.

The product allows users to have a unique, electronic business card that can be mailed around, secured with digital signatures and allowed to travel among the user’s contacts, colleagues and connections.

When the user’s personal data changes, the new information can be electronically updated in a secure, peer-to-peer type of system, Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft’s senior vice president for Office, told analysts and the media here Thursday.

View full article: MS Office Interconnect Beta Manages Contacts, Digital Business Cards

Outlook 2003 has some issues with custom forms. Although most issues with forms have been fixed in Office 2003 Service Pack 1 occasionally you still get confronted with “Outlook cannot open this form …” messages. You’re only solution; clear the forms cache and try again!

Clearing the forms cache is quite a longwinded process. This might be OK if it just happens every now and then but when you are for instance developing a lot of forms this can be quite time consuming. If you need to clear the cache quite often you might be better of using the script posted in the article below.

Download: Clearing the Forms Cache Script

Updates to the Office 2003 Resource Kit for SP1 include all the ADM template files. Corrections to a few registry entries, deletion of policies no longer used by Office 2003, and the addition of new policies to allow for better control of an Office deployment on Active Directory enabled networks, are provided in this update.

Download: Office 2003 SP1 ADM updates

Exchange Server 2003 Security Hardening Guide
This book guides you through the process of hardening your Exchange 2003 environment, including configuration recommendations and strategies for combating external threats.

Exchange Server 2003 Glossary
The Exchange Server 2003 Glossary contains important terms and definitions for the Exchange Server 2003 product. This is a working document that will be updated and enhanced ongoing.

Exchange 2003 Transport and Routing Guide
This guide explains how transport and routing works in Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003, and how you can configure Exchange to enable internal and external mail flow.

Better sooner than later – the first PowerToys are already here and available for download. Bear in mind that “PowerToy = hobby project”, so these are not necessarily the same robustly designed and high quality things you should expect in the main product, but that said, many of us use them all the time at work and they have been worked over plenty by our internal user group, so they’re good to go.

You can check out the PowerToys page (may not be up just yet if you’re reading this post July 27-28):
http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote/powertoys

Or go directly to these download pages to get the first two PowerToys:

IE to OneNote. This PowerToy adds a button to IE that lets you send any page or a selection on a page to OneNote. You get the same results as a copy/paste would give you, but you can do it all in one click. It also nicely puts the clippings in a single section so you can browse and clip, browse and clip. Then review your research later, complete with links back to the source pages. Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=a9872a17-2d0c-47f0-9b4d-026e94a8ef1c&displaylang=en

Outlook to OneNote. This PowerToy adds a button to Outlook so that you can send any email message (or group of email messages if you multi-select) to OneNote to keep them together with notes and other docs. Very handy if you like to have a “project folder” section in OneNote that keeps all your stuff together in an easy to flip through and modify/reuse format.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=87c661e3-178d-46f0-979e-0fdd96327928&displaylang=en

View: New PowerToys for OneNote 2003 SP1

Sperry Software has been sold to You Software!

You Software Inc., the award-winning publisher of personal and network value-add productivity software, today announced it has secured more than $2 million in Series A financing with investments from SmartForest Ventures, Second Avenue Partners and Cedar Grove Investments. The financing will be used to launch the company’s initial value-add software products for Microsoft Office and Outlook users and to expand its development team. The company also announced the acquisition of Sperry Software Inc., the best-selling provider of productivity utilities for Microsoft Outlook. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

“We believe there are tremendous opportunities for You Software to deliver high-quality value-add products for the hundreds of millions of people who use Microsoft Outlook,” said Debi Coleman, SmartForest Ventures partner and former CIO, CFO and vice president of Worldwide Operations for Apple Computer Inc. “The You Software team has a proven history of making productivity software easier for customers to use.”

Sperry Software, founded by Mike Sperry in 1998, is a Microsoft Certified Partner and provider of the best-selling add-on productivity tools for Microsoft Outlook. Sperry Software, with a customer base of more than 12,000 users, has been recognized as the best single source of Outlook add-ons by leading industry press. The technology and products contributed by Sperry Software will help accelerate You Software’s penetration into the huge market for value-add software for Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office. You Software intends to improve the customer value of Sperry Software products by making the software more affordable while adding appealing features that improve usability and facilitate customization.

View full Press Release: You Software Enters PC Productivity Market With Funding and Strategic Acquisition
View: Sperry Software Add-Ins

Access 2003 developers, administrators, and users now have a new toolkit to aid them in analyzing Access 97 databases for upgrade and conversion to Access 2003. Use the tools in the Access 2003 Conversion Toolkit to find and analyze your databases in preparation for switching to the latest version of Access.

Note: This toolkit does not covert your databases. It only helps you with scoping and identifying known issues that have an impact on the conversion process.

Download: Access 2003 Conversion Toolkit

Microsoft Corp. customers today started downloading the Microsoft® Office 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) which, as a result of their feedback, delivers continued improvements in reliability and performance for the Microsoft Office System as well as new feature enhancements for Microsoft Office OneNote® 2003 and Microsoft Office InfoPath (TM) 2003. With Office 2003 SP1, customers can develop InfoPath-based solutions more easily; create, organize and share notes more effectively in OneNote; and be even more confident in deploying the most reliable and secure version of Microsoft Office ever released.

“Microsoft really listens to its customers,” said Teresa Grote, chief information officer at Dinsmore & Shohl LLP, a law firm in Cincinnati. “We’ve worked closely with Microsoft to suggest improvements to the security and rich media features in OneNote. We’re thrilled to see that those features are included in the SP1 release, and we expect them to continue increasing our staff’s productivity and improving their overall work product.”

View full Press Release: Microsoft Delivers Continued Improvement With Office 2003 Service Pack 1

Aside from fixing stuff Office 2003 SP1 also brings extra features to Outlook 2003

Junk E-mail Filter: International. You can now block Top Level Domains and messages with specific encoding
Junk E-mail Filter: Safe Senders. Automatically add people you reply to to the Safe Senders List
Calendar logging. For more info see http://support.microsoft.com/?id=841064

Dropped: Microsoft Internet Free/Busy options; The service was dropped already but the options were still available.

I updated the guide to cover Office 2003 SP1

View: Create an Office 2003 CD slipstreamed with Service Pack 1

Download: Office 2003 SP1 + InfoPath 2003 SP1
Download: OneNote 2003 SP1
Download: Visio 2003 SP1
Download: Project 2003 SP1
Download: Project Server 2003 Service Pack 1
Download: Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager Service Pack 1
Download: Update for Outlook 2003- Junk E-mail Filter (KB870765)
Download: Office 2003 Add-in- Office Web Components
Download: InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET
Download: Office Update Inventory Tool Version 2.1

Or use OfficeUpdate!

Not all KB support articles are live yet so you need to read the release notes even more carefully!

Archive 48

Alright, so after I saw 2 guys getting arrested for not having a valid train ticked (and then still refuse to buy a ticked and cause a lot of trouble in the train) I got a bit bored in the train this weekend. So I took a deep dive into the registry and tried to find out which key determines whether Cached Exchange Mode is enabled or disabled. Great new; I’ve found it!

View: Enabling/Disabling Cached Exchange Mode through the Registry

From the Author;
ABC Amber Outlook Converter is intended to help you keep your important messages organized in one file (as hypertext system). It is a very useful tool that converts your e-mails from MS Outlook to any document format (CHM, PDF, HTML, RTF, HLP, TXT Ansi, TXT Unicode, DOC, MCW, WPS, SAM, RFT, WS4, WS7, WRI, etc.) easily and quickly. All you have to do is select required messages, choose document format to convert and click Save As button. Currently our software supports more than 50 languages. With ABC Amber Outlook Converter you won’t ever waste your time to organize your messages!

View: screenshot
View: homepage
Order: ABC Amber Outlook Converter

Sender ID will be used with Hotmail, MSN, and Microsoft.com e-mail addresses.

Microsoft will soon put some bite into its Sender ID antispam plans. The software giant will check e-mail messages sent to its Hotmail, MSN, and Microsoft.com mail accounts to see if they come from valid e-mail servers, as identified by the Sender ID, according to a company executive.

The company is strongly urging e-mail providers and Internet service providers to publish, by mid-September, Sender Policy Framework records that identify their e-mail servers in the domain name system. Microsoft will begin matching the source of inbound e-mail to the Internet Protocol addresses of e-mail servers listed in that sending domain’s SPF record by October 1.

Messages that fail the check will not be rejected but will be further scrutinized and filtered, says Craig Spiezle, director of Microsoft’s Safety Technology and Strategy Group.

View full article: Microsoft to Enforce Antispam Plan

Lookout is lightning-fast search for your email, files, and desktop integrated with Microsoft Outlook™. Built on top of a powerful search engine, Lookout is the only personal search engine that can search all of your email from directly within Outlook – in seconds…

You can use Lookout to search your:

Email messages
Contacts, calendar, notes, tasks, etc.
Data from exchange, POP, IMAP, PST files, Public Folders
Files on your computer or other computers
… Very soul (okay, not true)

Just enter your search and press enter. Results are instant. Lookout will find your search terms hiding nearly anywhere in your Outlook mailbox – subjects, bodies, phone numbers, addresses, etc.

Supports Outlook 2000, 2002/XP and 2003

Download: Lookout

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has reached a settlement with Scott Richter, a prominent Internet marketer who was sued in December on accusations of sending deceptive junk e-mail.

Richter and his company, OptInRealBig.com, agreed to pay a $40,000 fine and $10,000 toward the investigative cost. That is far smaller than the millions in penalties that Spitzer said he would seek when he filed the case.

“We will drive them into bankruptcy, and therefore others will not come into the marketplace to take their place,” Spitzer said in December. “If we’re going to succeed, we not only have to shut down those who are there now but make it evident that there is no viable business model here.”

Brad Maione, a spokesman for Spitzer, declined to comment on the discrepancy between Spitzer’s comment in December and the amount of the ultimate fine.

View full article: Spam sender settles N.Y. case

Microsoft Producer 2003 for PowerPoint 2003 is the next release of this very popular add-in for PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2002. Producer 2003 provides users with many powerful new features that make it easier to synchronize audio, video, slides, and images to create engaging and effective rich-media presentations. Producer 2003 gives content and media professionals, as well as everyday PowerPoint users a host of new content authoring features.

Download: Producer for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003

The Navigation Pane is new in Outlook 2003. It is designed for easier management of the same type of folders like Mail, Calendar and Contacts folders. The Navigation Pane also holds the Folder List and the Outlook Bar has been replaced with the Shortcuts Navigation. These enhancements are great especially when you must manage a lot of Calendar and Contacts folders of other people or Public Folders. This is one of the reasons we started our upgrade to from Office 2002 to Office 2003 with the secretaries. They really loved the enhancements as some of them were managing a Folder List of several meters long (managers are real mail collectors and love to organize by putting every mail in their own folder :-D).

With the enhancements of the Navigation Pane also came quite a lot of options but not all of them are really easy to notice or to work with right from the start. This is why I wrote the Navigation Pane Tips & Tricks guide. Click the link below for the Tips & Tricks.

View: Navigation Pane Tips & Tricks

Six out of 10 companies claim they will give up email if the threat posed by viruses, spam and other unwanted content is not contained and a viable alternative emerges.

Responding to an email security survey carried out by MessageLabs a further 40 per cent said they feel ‘worried’ by the current email security threat to their business, with only 29 per cent feeling ‘optimistic’.

The survey shows that few (15 per cent) think email will remain the same application over the next decade, while two thirds think it will merge with other messaging applications, such as wireless and instant messaging. But only 14 per cent of respondents think it will become completely obsolete.

Over 20 per cent of firms responding to the research indicated that online fraud such as phishing and identity theft will be the greatest threat. Viruses achieved a similar rating (21 per cent).

View full article: Worried firms consider email boycott

Microsoft’s MSN division announced Thursday that it has acquired Lookout Software, a firm whose technology searches messages in the software giant’s Outlook e-mail client.

Details of the acquisition remain murky, as Microsoft did not disclose financial terms and did not describe how Lookout will be integrated. What the company did say was the acquisition builds on MSN Search’s ongoing efforts to refurbish itself through a series of changes.

“Our vision is to take search beyond today’s basic Internet search services to deliver direct answers to people’s questions, and help them find information from a broad range of sources,” Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of MSN, said in a statement.

View full article: Microsoft buys Lookout to boost search
View Press Release from Microsoft: MSN Announces Investment in Search Technology

Additional file and image filters for Office applications. These additional converters and filters are for older or seldom used documents or image formats.

Download: Office File Converter Pack

Microsoft Corp. said on Thursday that it won an almost $4 million verdict against a California man for trademark infringement, false advertising and “cybersquatting” stemming from an unsolicited commercial e-mail campaign to distribute a desktop toolbar program on recipients’ Windows desktops.

Daniel Khoshnood of Canoga Park, California, was ordered to pay $3.95 million after the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California found in favor of Microsoft in the civil case, which Microsoft filed in June 2003, after receiving a flood of spam on its MSN and MSN Hotmail e-mail services from Khoshnood. The e-mail messages claimed to offer a toolbar that, once installed, would automatically update recipients’ Windows systems with security patches, Microsoft said in a statement.

Microsoft won a summary judgement against Khoshnood and his companies, Pointcom Inc. and Joshuathan Investments, in January. That judgement ordered Khoshnood to stop using Microsoft’s trademarks and name, refrain from spamming, and pay damages to and legal fees for the Redmond, Washington software company, according to a court document.

View full article: Microsoft wins $4 million spam verdict

The Microsoft Office Information Bridge Framework 1.0 Resource Kit includes a set of tools, documentation, and sample solutions. The Resource Kit is a useful aid for new or experienced Information Bridge Framework solution developers.

The resource kit is divided into three distinct sets of downloads: Tools, Documentation, and Sample Solutions.

Download: The Microsoft Office Information Bridge Framework 1.0 Resource Kit – Documentation

New Hampshire’s tax commissioner has temporarily abandoned plans to tax a broad swath of online services, including Internet phone calls, chat rooms, Web mail and instant messaging.
A representative of the Department of Revenue Administration said Tuesday that after encountering criticism of the proposal at a public hearing the day before, Commissioner G. Philip Blatsos had decided to leave any Internet tax decisions to the state legislature.

“Because this is a tremendously important policy issue, rather than go through the rulemaking process at this point, we should defer to the legislative study committee,” said Val Berghaus, an assistant to Blatsos. “At the request of legislative leaders of the Ways and Means committee, (Blatsos) is going to defer to that request.” The legislative committee is scheduled to convene Aug. 4.

View full article: New Hampshire: E-mail free or die…for now

View: Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for July, 2004

Antispam company Postini Inc. is now rejecting more than half of all attempts to send e-mail to its customers, in part because of increased activity from compromised home computers that have been turned into “zombies” for sending unsolicited commercial e-mail.
The company is dropping 53% of all e-mail connections that use the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) without reading the content of the e-mail messages. That’s a sharp increase since the company began aggregating information about troublesome Internet addresses from across its customer base, said Andrew Lochart, director of product marketing at Postini.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based company manages e-mail for about 3,300 companies and 5 million e-mail users. Postini uses its own algorithms to spot spam, denial-of-service attacks and other threats by analyzing the behavior of Internet-connected machines that send e-mail and, after that, the message content.

View full article: Postini: Half of all e-mail requests rejected

Archive 47

With this add-in you can permanently remove hidden and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Word 2003/XP, Excel 2003/XP, and PowerPoint 2003/XP files.

When you distribute an Office document electronically, the document might contain information that you do not want to share publicly, such as information you’ve designated as “hidden” or information that allows you to collaborate on writing and editing the document with others.

The Remove Hidden Data add-in is a tool that you can use to remove personal or hidden data that might not be immediately apparent when you view the document in your Microsoft Office application.

Download: Office 2003/XP Add-in: Remove Hidden Data

As it faces a more serious threat from Linux on the desktop, Microsoft will invest $50 million during its next fiscal year to accelerate more corporate deployment of Windows XP and Office 2003.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant will announce at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto a revamped “Desktop Deployment Initiative” that provides partners with more business investment funds, resources and personnel to help get customers upgraded to Microsoft’s latest fleet of desktop software.

Most significantly, the fund will pay for 57 new hires worldwide who will be deployed as desktop specialists in the field. In the United States, Microsoft will deploy 24 desktop experts who will be empowered to help partners and customers realize a return on investment (ROI) on software many have licensed as part of their Microsoft upgrade contracts but have not yet installed.

Microsoft estimates that only 30 percent of its installed base currently runs the three-year-old Windows XP, while a much smaller percentage has installed Office 2003. And only a third of the total Office installed base today runs Microsoft’s Office XP.

View full article: Microsoft Desktop Initiative To Push Windows XP, Office 2003 Deployments

MapPoint and Streets & Trips Construction Update (July 13)

Download the construction update to keep your maps current.

Save the file in the Data folder, located where you installed the program files for MapPoint or Streets & Trips. For example C:\Program Files\Microsoft MapPoint\Data\.

Download: MapPoint 2001 and Streets and Trips 2001 Construction Update
Download: MapPoint 2002 and Streets and Trips 2002 Construction Update
Download: MapPoint 2003 and Streets and Trips 2003 Construction Update
Download: MapPoint 2004 and Streets and Trips 2004 Construction Update

The software giant has hooked up with Britain’s biggest telco to offer improved Web conferencing

Microsoft is set to announce a deal on Monday with British communications giant BT Group to boost the software giant’s Live Meeting Web conferencing service.

BT will resell Live Meeting subscriptions integrated with the company’s own conference calling services, according to a statement from the companies. BT also has signed on to use Live Meeting internally for its 150,000 Internet-connected employees.

View full article: Microsoft Live Meeting gets BT boost

View: Flash presentation

Every so often people ask us – “How often do you recommend we run the offline defrag?” Meaning – how often do we run it to have the server run OK?
The short answer would be – we do NOT recommend this to be run as any type of “regular” maintenance at all.

Looking at this closer – what really happens when you do an offline defrag?

View: Is offline defragmentation considered regular Exchange maintenance?

Have you always been curious how many people still use Outlook 97 or how fast people are adopting Outlook 2003? Now you’ll know

Cast your vote today!

4Team Corporation is a software production company working in Software Industry since 1999.

Their primary objective is to provide their customers with affordable workgroup management solutions. Their software products are developed to improve the productivity and efficiency of a workgroup that uses Microsoft Office programs as its software basis.

One of their most popular add-ins;
Share Outlook: Sharing any Microsoft Outlook Personal folders without a server.

See all of their products in the Add-Ins section.

Flirting used to be something that happened primarily at bars, parties or the local Starbucks, but a new survey from MSN found that instant messaging (IM) is the choice of today’s Romeos, both in the United States and worldwide. More than 35 percent of Americans who responded to the survey say they’ve used Web-based services such as MSN® Messenger to set up romantic dates, with 50 percent saying they have used it to get to know a potential partner early in a relationship. Worldwide, the numbers are even larger, with over 40 percent of respondents saying they have used IM to set up dates and nearly 58 percent saying they have used it to find out more about people they might like to date.

View full article: Flirting’s Moved Online! New Research From MSN Reveals Millions Swap IM Addresses With Potential Dates

Microsoft wants customers yet to upgrade to its latest software versions to ‘understand’ why they need to do so, and plans to dispel the perception that older versions of its software are ‘good enough’.

In a wide-ranging ‘state of the nation’ email sent to Microsoft employees, chief executive Steve Ballmer said: “So many customers have yet to deploy our most recent advances, so we must not only help them understand why to deploy, but demonstrate the benefits of deploying before we reach the Longhorn generation.”

He said the company needed to change customers’ perceptions, including the view that “older versions of Office and Windows are good enough and that Microsoft is not sufficiently focused on security”.

This, he said, would be achieved by emphasising “key positive perceptions of the strong manageability, and developer and information worker preference, for our platform”.

Ballmer said customers were still feeling pain over security issues, but added that products were now being built “in a way that significantly reduces vulnerabilities and customers’ exposure to attack”.

View full article: Microsoft to ‘educate’ users on software upgrades

The latest variant of the Lovgate worm scans PCs for executable files and then renames them, a tactic used by viruses from a much older generation, according to antivirus companies.

The Lovgate worm first appeared in February 2003 and has since mutated many times. The most recent versions of the worm–Lovgate.AE and Lovgate.AH–were discovered on Sunday. They spread by e-mailing themselves to addresses found on an infected machine and then open a “back door” to give control of the infected system to an attacker. Finally, the worms scan for vulnerable PCs connected to the infected system’s local network–using the same Windows vulnerability exploited by the MSBlast worm almost a year ago.

The most important difference is the worm’s destructive nature. Although the latest Lovgate worm does not delete any user data–such as documents or spreadsheets–it replaces executable files (with the .exe extension) on the local hard drive with further copies of itself. This process can leave an infected computer effectively useless because it is unable to run any applications.

View full article: Old-school worm loves Windows applications

Microsoft should release a 64-bit version of Office at the same time as its 64-bit version of XP – due by the end of the year – if it wants to attract more corporates to its Software Assurance licensing scheme, according to Rob Enderle of analyst firm Enderle Group.

Enderle said such a move could encourage more firms to sign up to Software Assurance now that Microsoft has discontinued its Upgrade Advantage licensing programme.

“It would make sense to have a 64-bit version of Office to release alongside [64-bit XP],” he added.

And moving Office to a 64-bit environment would allow Microsoft to eliminate security holes in the 32-bit versions. “Security has become the IT manager’s biggest nightmare,” commented Enderle.

View full article: Firms want safer version of Office

The number of unique new unsolicited e-mail messages has risen 42 percent from 350,000 per day at the end of 2003 to 500,000 a day by the end of June, according to antispam vendor Commtouch Software.

And while 49 countries have been identified as hosting Web sites referenced in spam e-mails, China is still the host for 73.5 percent of such sites, Commtouch says in a statement. Spammers include those site links to provide more information regarding their products, or to allow users to buy the products online.

View full article: Amount of Spam Still Skyrocketing

The Massachusetts Attorney General’s office has filed suit against a Florida man suspected of sending spam e-mail to thousands of consumers, in what’s considered to be the first claim brought by a state under the federal Can-Spam Act.

On Thursday, the state’s attorney general, Thomas Reilly, filed a complaint against a business known as DC Enterprises, and its reported proprietor, William T. Carson, for allegedly distributing bulk e-mail that advertised inexpensive mortgage rates. In addition to alleging that the company violated numerous conditions of Can-Spam, the federal government’s freshly minted answer to the spam epidemic, Reilly is pursuing charges against the defendant for breaching several Massachusetts laws that deal with mortgage brokering.

View full article: Massachusetts files suit under Can-Spam

The UK, US and Australia are combining forces to combat spam. They have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to promote joint enforcement and investigation of spammers across the three countries.

Stephen Timms, the UK communications minister, today called on other countries to join the trio in their anti-spam crusade. He said the MoU is “not going to solve spam overnight but it is going to help. It reinforces our determination to tackle spam with a combination of government and industry initiatives, technical solutions, and user awareness.

Timothy Muris, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, said: “Illegal spam does not respect national boundaries. This agreement is an important next step to help law enforcers on three continents leverage resources to combat illegal spam.”

View full article: US, UK and Australia sign anti-spam act

Archive 46

Describes how to create your own customized presentation templates to use in Producer 2003. Readers should have a basic understanding of cascading style sheets and HTML.

Download: Creating Custom Templates for Microsoft Producer 2003 white paper

Detailed discussion of how Microsoft IT partnered with the Office, Exchange, Windows, and SharePoint product development teams to develop a testing and deployment strategy that delivered Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 to nearly 70,000 computers within the corporation. The testing strategy, which utilized a large, carefully configured control group of several thousand users, has led to a robust product that has been rigorously tested in a real world environment. The deployment validated key productivity and functionality enhancements in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 products, dependent Line of Business applications, and related products such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Best practices from the deployment are detailed.

Download: Planning and Deploying Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003

As promised here are some pictures from Tech-ed. I’ll write the story later as I’m already late for the party!

View Picture; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

In case you were wondering why I wasn’t in the newsgroups; I’m at Tech•Ed Europe this week. If you’re there as well; come and visit me in the Ask the Expert section at the Tablet PC booth. I’m giving demo’s there with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 (codename Lonestar), OneNote SP1, InfoPath SP1, the Context Tagging Tool and lots of other cool new features for the Tablet PC. We have 10 Tablet PC’s at our booth to illustrate the variety of Tablets to choose from these days. When you complete the Hand on Lab for the Tablet PC you can collect a 64MB USB Memory Stick at our booth!

Tomorrow I’ll be dragging along my camera so expect some pictures of the event tomorrow or later this week!

View: Microsoft Hosts Over 6,500 Developers and IT Professionals at Tech•Ed Europe

By Bill Gates;
I’d like to update you on the progress that Microsoft and our industry are making to curb the epidemic of junk email. Since I sent a message to customers on this subject a year ago, we’ve made significant advances against spam. It’s still a major problem — an invasion of privacy, a costly drain on time and resources and, as a carrier of worms and viruses, a significant threat to computer security. The good news is that billions of junk emails are being blocked every day, and spamming has become a more difficult and less rewarding business.

Much of the improvement Microsoft customers have experienced so far has resulted from broad deployment of SmartScreen, our advanced spam-filtering technology. SmartScreen has provided a significant benefit to users of MSN 8 and MSN Premium, MSN Hotmail and Outlook 2003. Since Hotmail deployed it six months ago, SmartScreen has been blocking more than 95 percent of all incoming spam — an average of nearly 3 billion messages every day. Because we believe that SmartScreen is crucial to the war against spam, we recently began making it available free to all users of Exchange Server 2003, via a download of the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter from www.microsoft.com/exchange.

Nonetheless, the actions of spammers over the past year have reinforced our conviction that current filtering technologies are not enough. Knowing that only a small percentage of their output will get past today’s filters, spammers have responded by significantly cranking up the volume of emails they send. So networks are burdened with even more junk than before. According to some surveys, email traffic now consists of nearly four spam messages for every legitimate one.

Clearly, we must find additional ways to counter spam. Microsoft is working on a number of new technologies and strategies that we believe will bring significant improvement.

View full article: Preserving and Enhancing the Benefits of Email — A Progress Report

Exchange 2003 SDK Documentation and Samples June 2004
The documentation and samples assist developers in building applications for Exchange 2003 Server.

Exchange 2000 SDK Documentation and Samples June 2004
The documentation and samples assist developers in building applications for Exchange 2000 Server.

Exchange Server 2003 Message Security Guide
Updated July 2004. This book discusses how, when using S/MIME, encryption protects the contents of e-mail messages and digital signatures verify the identity of a purported sender of an e-mail message.

Working with Active Directory Permissions in Microsoft Exchange 2003
This guide helps Exchange architects in their understanding of how Exchange uses Active Directory in the context of permissions. Further, this document is a reference guide for administrators implementing a split permissions model.

Chris Pratley wrote;
Today we had our ship party for OneNote 2003 SP1 down at Sammamish State Park (at the south end of Lake Sammamish in Issaquah for those who might know the greater Seattle area). Although we have signed off on the code, the process of building a patch, verifying it, and creating international versions continues so you won’t see the final SP1 bits for a few more weeks.

Click the link below for some highlights of OneNote 2003 SP1

View: OneNote 2003 SP1 has wrapped

The man who invented the Esperanto of the technology world enabling computers to swap information freely has died.
Bob Bemer developed the Ascii coding system to standardise the way computers represent letters, numbers, punctuation marks and some control codes.

He also introduced the backslash and escape key to the world of computers and was one of the first to warn about the dangers of the millennium bug.

Mr Bemer died on 22 June at his home in Texas following a battle with cancer.

View full article: Key computer coding creator dies

Updated June 2004. Extensive improvements were made to the order and details in several procedures. Graphics of warning message boxes were added in procedures, as well as clearer explanations of the actions required from users when various warning messages appear.

The May 28th, 2004 update contained minor corrections for DWORD and global catalog server references. The original update (May 2004) was released for Service Pack 1 (SP1) with information about the new user interface in Exchange System Manager.

Overall, this guide describes four scenarios to deploy the Windows RPC over HTTP feature in a corporate environment, for both Exchange Server 2003 SP1, and Exchange Server 2003.

Download: Exchange Server 2003 RPC over HTTP Deployment Scenarios

Next week it is TechEd Europe time! I’ll be there all week as well where you could find me at the Ask The Expert booth for Tablet PC’s. If you’re there as well; don’t be a stranger and visit the ATE Tablet PC booth. From what I’ve heard so far it’s going to be a nice booth with quite a few demo tablets…

Microsoft TechEd Europe
Microsoft’s definitive European conference for Building, Deploying, Securing and Managing connected solutions
GET INSIDE the code, the products and the technologies… at this year’s Microsoft premier technical conference. Create your own customized four-day technical training program, participate in hands-on training and preview the latest technology.

View: TechEd 2004 Europe

A U.S. congressional committee on Thursday approved a bill designed to crack down on deceptive “spyware” that hides in users’ computers and secretly monitors their activities.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 45-4 for a bill that would require software makers to notify people before loading new programs on their machines that collects information about them.

Spyware can sap computing power, crash machines and bury users under a blizzard of unwanted ads. It can capture passwords, credit-card numbers and other sensitive data.

The bill, introduced by Reps. Mary Bono, a California Republican, and Ed Towns, a New York Democrat, would allow the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to seek millions of dollars in fines for some of the practices lawmakers consider most egregious, such as logging users’ keystrokes or stealing their identities.

It also would require that spyware be made easily removable.

View full article: Anti-Spyware Bill Advances in Congress

MSN® Hotmail®, the world’s most popular free Web-based e-mail service, will undergo a major upgrade, delivering customers world-class e-mail protection as well as enhanced storage to satisfy all their needs. Starting in early July, MSN will roll out free e-mail anti-virus protection to all the 170 million MSN Hotmail customers worldwide, making MSN Hotmail the only free global e-mail service to both scan and clean incoming and outgoing e-mail for viruses and worms before they can enter a customer’s inbox. MSN also announced it will bring increased storage – 250MB inboxes – to free MSN Hotmail customers in multiple markets and will introduce MSN Hotmail Plus, an upgraded premium Web service to help customers get the most out of MSN Hotmail.

“We know from talking with our customers that online safety is their No. 1 concern,” said Blake Irving, corporate vice president of Communication Services and Member Platform for MSN. “MSN is intensely focused on providing a safer and more robust communications experience for consumers. Providing free anti-virus cleaning helps protect our Hotmail customers while guarding members of the overall Hotmail community and the friends and family they e-mail.”

Later this summer, MSN will begin increasing storage limits for free MSN Hotmail accounts in multiple markets around the world. Customers will receive 125 times their current e mail storage with the introduction of 250MB inboxes and have the ability to send attachments up to 10 MB. Upon upgrade, MSN Hotmail customers will also receive MSN Calendar free, enabling both individual and shared calendaring.

View Full Press Release: MSN Announces Comprehensive Worldwide Upgrade to MSN Hotmail

Microsoft Corp., author of the Microsoft® Caller ID for E-mail proposal, and Meng Weng Wong, co-founder and CTO of Pobox.com and author of the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), have announced today that they have successfully converged the two proposals into one specification named Sender ID and submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for consideration as an industrywide standard for e-mail authentication as part of the IETF’s efforts to define effective industry Internet e-mail standards to address the problem of spam. Sender ID is designed to help verify the source of e-mail to help eliminate domain spoofing and provide greater protection against phishing schemes. By providing a unified specification, Microsoft and Wong hope to simplify industry adoption of effective e-mail authentication technology, thereby helping more swiftly provide greater spam protection to e-mail users worldwide.

“Spoofing,” or sending e-mail purporting to be from someone it’s not, is an increasingly common and relatively simple way for spammers to try to trick filters. It can also pose a security risk when used to deliver e-mail viruses or phisher scams, which attempt to trick users into divulging personal information such as credit card numbers or account passwords by pretending to be from a legitimate source, such as a user’s bank. Sender ID aims to prevent spoofing by confirming what domain a message came from and thereby increase the effectiveness of spam filters.

View full Press Release: Sender ID Specification Submitted for Standards Body Consideration

The Anti-Spam Technical Alliance (ASTA), whose participants include Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq “YHOO”), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq “MSFT”), EarthLink (Nasdaq “ELNK”) and America Online Inc. (NYSE “TWX”), today unveiled the result of more than a year of close collaboration by presenting a host of detailed best practices and technical recommendations for the entire industry in an effort to fight the scourge of spam.

The proposal provides recommended actions and policies for Internet service providers (ISPs) and e-mail service providers (ESPs) as well as large senders of e-mail including governments, private corporations and online marketing organizations. These recommendations primarily focus on two key issues: helping solve the e-mail forgery problem by eliminating domain spoofing through Internet Protocol (IP)-based and signature-based solutions; and best practices to help prevent ISPs and their customers from being sources of spam.

View full article: Anti-Spam Technical Alliance Publishes Industry Recommendations to Help Stop Spam

Not trying to be rude on this but; didn’t we know this already? Embedding pictures goes back to Outlook version …??? At least they are slowed down now; embedding pictures makes their SPAM e-mails a lot larger in size! Also, they won’t be able anymore to check whether your address is valid by means of the downloaded image.

Don’t forget you can always beat them (in displaying pornographic images) by choosing to display all messages in Plain Text;
Outlook 2003; Tools-> Options-> tab Preferences-> button E-mail Options…-> option: Read all standard mail in plain text
When needed you can now change individual messages back to HTML with just 2 clicks.

Alright, enough from me; go on, read the article

Spammers have found a way to bypass Outlook 2003’s anti-spam security by embedding pornographic images into their emails.

Spammers who send pornographic pictures in the hope of enticing the recipient to signing up to an adult Web site have discovered a way to bypass Outlook 2003’s security features, which are designed to stop potentially offensive content being automatically displayed in the preview window.

The latest version of Microsoft’s Outlook was built with a relatively sophisticated spam filter, but as the product’s first birthday approaches, spammers are finding new ways to ensure that their unsolicited message go undetected.

In order to help fight spam, Microsoft armed Outlook 2003 with a Bayesian filter, which tries to recognise unsolicited messages by examining the words used and, depending on the frequency of certain key words, calculating the probability of that e-mail being spam.

The company also improved on previous versions of Outlook by allowing users to choose if an HTML email should be allowed to access the Internet and download content. This gives the user a chance to prevent the pornography from ever reaching his or her PC.

However, John Cheney, chief executive of email-security firm BlackSpider Technologies, explained that one of the growing trends is for spammers to attach a pornographic image file to their emails and then use HTML code to display the attached image. This means that Outlook doesn’t need to access the Internet before displaying the picture.

View full article: Porn spammers sneak images into Outlook

Archive 45

Due to the addition of new features in Microsoft Office Project Professional 2003, you cannot use Project Professional 2003 to save projects to an existing Microsoft Project Server 2002 installation without first making some minor modifications to the database schema. You can load and view projects from an unmodified Microsoft Project Server 2002 database in Project Professional 2003, but if you want to make changes or create new projects in Project Professional 2003 and save them back to Project Server 2002, you must download and run the four SQL scripts provided here. These scripts will add some additional fields to the database tables that are required by Project Professional 2003, but will be ignored by earlier versions, so users of Microsoft Project Professional 2002 or Microsoft Project Standard 2002 can continue to connect as normal to the upgraded Microsoft Project Server 2002 database.

Download: Project Professional 2003 Database Compatibility Scripts for Microsoft Project Server 2002

ActiveX controls for Project Web Access are installed by default when you install Project Server. You can install Project Web Access (PWA) ActiveX controls on client workstations manually in cases where your organization operates in a locked-down environment in which users cannot install OCX controls.

Download: Project Server 2003: Project Web Access ActiveX Controls

When it comes to improving the spelling checker in Word or finding new ways to draw charts in Excel, Microsoft probably has things covered.

But to figure out the broad changes needed for its venerable Office software, Microsoft is turning to an Indian medical student, an aspiring architect from Kenya and 13 other young adults from across the globe.

The young people, ages 19 to 24, are part of an “Information Worker Board of the Future” that will spend this week touring Microsoft’s campus and discussing their ideas for the future of work and software.

Microsoft hopes the investment will pay off with some insight into how their flagship Office software needs to evolve.

“We want them to tell us what we don’t know,” said Dan Rasmus, a former Giga Information Group analyst who joined Microsoft last year to head up its Information Work Vision effort.

View full article: Microsoft hopes younger eyes have Office vision

This sample demonstrates how to migrate an existing Word VBA solution to a Visual Studio Tools for Office solution.

Download: Migrating Microsoft Word VBA Solutions to Visual Studio Tools for Office Sample

ActiveWin interviewed Steve Ballmer and asked him about anything including the MVP Program on which I would like to say; “Thanks, and you’re welcome! :-)”

ActiveWin.com: How do you feel the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program has impacted Microsoft customers and technical communities worldwide?

Steve Ballmer: MVPs have a tremendous impact on Microsoft customers and technical communities worldwide, and their passion for technology is inspiring. Their commitment to helping customers optimize their use of Microsoft technologies is key, as is the feedback they provide, which is vital to product development and R&D. When I spoke at this year’s MVP summit, it was the largest ever, with MVPs representing 63 countries. We can’t thank the MVPs enough for their contributions.

View full interview: Interview with Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer (CEO): Microsoft Corporation

Deploying a Worldwide Site Consolidation Solution for Exchange Server 2003 at Microsoft Detailed discussion on how Microsoft IT used Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Office System 2003 to enable a consolidation of Exchange sites from 75 to just seven worldwide. To accomplish this task, the IT Messaging team gathered and analyzed detailed wide area network (WAN)-level network measurements on a site-by-site basis to determine if consolidation was viable. It then consolidated its mailbox server infrastructure on Windows server clusters using storage area network (SAN) storage enclosures. Follow-up network measurements were taken after each group of sites was migrated to ensure latency and performance requirements were met.

Download: Deploying a Worldwide Site Consolidation Solution for Exchange Server 2003 at Microsoft

Free Web-based training courses on Office Online are one of the best ways to gain valuable expertise on the Microsoft Office System programs. What’s in a course?

Easy-to-understand audio and visual aids.
Fully integrated practice sessions that use the actual application.
Self-evaluation tests that confirm your understanding.
Quick Reference Cards to refer to after you’ve taken the course.

If you already own a Microsoft Office 2003 product, you have access to these Web-based courses. If you do not own an Office 2003 product, you can learn about these courses by taking a special tour. You can also download a Microsoft Office Word 2003 document to view the content of the Quick Reference Cards.

Download: Office 2003 Publication: Office Online Training Courses Quick Reference Cards Content

The Microsoft Outlook Web Access 2003 Web-based Administration tool provides a long-awaited way of easily (and safely) making UI changes that previously required direct manipulation of the registry.

View: Microsoft Outlook Web Access 2003 Web-based Administration
Download: Exchange 2003: Outlook Web Access Web Administration

Exchange Server 2003 Cluster Configuration Checklist Discussion of the top cluster configuration issues developed through the operational experience of Microsoft IT that can adversely affect the performance and stability of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. By addressing the cluster configuration concerns outlined in this document, IT shops will prevent many of the most common problems that affect Exchange.

Download: Exchange Server 2003 Clustering Quality Assurance Checklist

The Bush administration will not immediately create a national do-not-spam registry to discourage unwanted e-mails, saying using current technology to do so might generate even more unsolicited sales pitches across the Internet, according to documents obtained Tuesday.

The Federal Trade Commission, expected to announce its decision later in the day, said it feared that unscrupulous senders of unwanted e-mails would mine such a registry of e-mail addresses looking for new victims, according to a summary of the FTC’s decision obtained by The Associated Press.

The commission, which was obligated to consider the proposal under the “can spam” legislation that Bush signed in December, concluded that it would be “largely powerless to identify those responsible for misusing the registry.”

View full article: U.S. declines to create do-not-spam list

With today’s use of e-mail you almost can’t afford to loose a single e-mail so let alone your entire mail archive. This guide is all about backing up and restoring your Outlook Data. It describes various methods and explains which method is best to be used in which scenarios.

How To: Backup and Restore

This download is a collection of sample files for use with the Introduction to XML in Word 2003 training course on Office Online.

Download: Word 2003 Sample: Practice files for Introduction to XML

Editing the HTML source code has been made very easy in Outlook Express. In Microsoft Office Outlook… well, not so much and I doubt whether the tool available has actually been designed for this since the process is anything but intuitive. But it can be done! Click the link below for detailed instructions.

How To: Edit the HTML Source Code while composing a Message

The Redmond, Wash., company, in an effort to slow the a barrage of junk e-mail directed at its customers, filed four lawsuits on Wednesday and four others on June 2, each naming at least 20 defendants whose identities are not known.

“These are high-volume spammers that are responsible for sending hundreds of millions of spam messages,” said Tim Cranton, a senior lawyer at Microsoft. The company also named Florida resident John Hites, who as recently as November was listed as one of the world’s top 10 spammers by Spamhaus, a nonprofit antispam group in Britain.

Microsoft said Mr. Hites is connected to HB Systems and Ads Inc., two foreign companies thought to have operations in the United States. Pin Point Media, a company based in either Coral Springs, Fla., or Weston, Fla., also was named. Mr. Hites and representatives from the three companies could not be reached for comment. Microsoft said it hopes to identify unknown defendants through the discovery process. It is seeking injunctions against the defendants and could collect as much as $1 million in civil fines from each one.

View full article: Microsoft sues 200 accused ‘spammers’

Journaling with Exchange 2003
Originally posted May 2004. Reposted June 9, 2004. See Additional Information for details. This guide discusses how the enhancements to the Journaling feature in Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) (and Exchange 2000 Server SP3, with the envelope journaling software update) makes messaging data more manageable for a broader compliance solution.

Exchange Server 2003 Message Security Guide
Reposted 1/19/2004. See Additional Information for details. This book discusses how, when using S/MIME, encryption protects the contents of e-mail messages and digital signatures verify the identity of a purported sender of an e-mail message.

Exchange Server 2003 Disaster Recovery Operations Guide
Originally posted May 2004. Reposted June 9, 2004. See Additional Information for details. This guide explains how to back up and restore the critical data in your Exchange organization.

Archive 44

A senior European Union official has berated the anti-spam industry for failure to agree a common strategy. Philippe Gerard said that lack of co-operation was handicapping the fight to hold back the junk mail tsunami.

“We see different initiatives going in all different directions and the effectiveness is maybe not there,” Gerard, an official with the EC’s Information Society directorate, told an anti-spam meeting in London. The BBC reports that Gerard said that spam was affecting consumer confidence.

The comments come at the same time as new stats from email filtering firm MessageLabs, which reckons May 2004 was the worst month for spam on record. Of the 909m inbound emails scanned by the MessageLabs Anti-Spam service, 691.5m were intercepted as spam, equating to a global spam ratio of 3 in every 4 emails (76 per cent).

View full article: EU attacks anti-spam industry

Download the construction update to keep your maps current in Microsoft MapPoint Streets & Trips. Save the file in the folder where you installed the program files for MapPoint or Streets & Trips. I.e. C:\Program Files\Microsoft MapPoint\Data\

MapPoint 2001 Streets & Trips 2001 Construction Update
MapPoint 2002 Streets & Trips 2002 Construction Update
MapPoint 2003 Streets & Trips 2003 Construction Update
MapPoint 2004 Streets & Trips 2004 Construction Update

In an Exchange environment you might encounter that your automatic forward/reply rules and Out of Office Assistant aren’t working. They probably are working but are forwarded/replying to a message from the Internet. This is disabled as a secure default on the Exchange server. This article explains how Exchange Administrators can change this behaviour.

View: Allow Automatic Forwarding/Replying to the Internet

This update addresses a vulnerability in Business Objects Crystal Reports, installed as part of Business Contact Manager installation, which could lead to Information Disclosure and Denial of Service attacks on an affected system.

Download: Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 Security Update: KB842496

In its continuing fight against unsolicited commercial e-mail, Microsoft plans to filter outgoing messages on its consumer mail services and is busy developing new “proofing” technologies, the software maker’s chief spam fighter says.

The fight is also one against the clock. Microsoft last year set a two-year goal to make spam a problem of the past. There are 19 months left, says Ryan Hamlin, general manager of Microsoft’s Security Technology & Strategy group, speaking at this week’s INBOX, a conference on e-mail in San Jose, California.

More than 14.5 billion spam messages are sent each day, according to Hamlin, who cites figures from antispam vendor Brightmail. Microsoft’s Hotmail Web-based e-mail service receives 2.7 billion spam messages a day, Hamlin says.

As part of its efforts to stop spam, Microsoft in the coming months plans to apply spam filters not only to incoming mail on its Hotmail and MSN services, but also to outbound mail. The filtering will kick in when users send a large number of messages and is intended to help stop abuse of Microsoft’s services by senders of spam, Hamlin says.

He called out to ISPs and other e-mail service providers to do the same. “All of the ISPs and large senders of mail need to be filtering on the outbound side,” he says. “There is a lot of abuse happening. We need to have better outbound filtering to look for people that are abusing our systems.”

View full article: Microsoft Fights Spam at the Source

One of Microsoft’s plans to fight the spam epidemic is unlikely to adversely affect spammers or reduce the quantity of spam, according to security experts.

Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates has been calling for the IT industry to work together and eradicate the spam problem. About six months ago he unveiled an initiative called Penny Black, which was a method for reducing a spammer’s ability to send large volumes of unsolicited emails using Hotmail and MSN accounts. He suggested making the senders’ computer process a complicated mathematical puzzle, which takes approximately 20 seconds, before each message is released. The puzzle’s result is attached to the email’s header, so that a receiving gateway can recognise emails that have been through the process and allow them to pass.

View full article: Microsoft’s anti-spam plan ‘hijacked by zombies’

A leading antivirus company warned Thursday that the Netsky worm was making a comeback on the coattails of fictional wizard Harry Potter.

British software and services company Sophos reported that infections by the three-month-old “P” variant of Netsky have risen dramatically over the past week, thanks to the worm’s ability to disguise itself as a Harry Potter game or book. The heavily promoted movie “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” opened earlier this week in Britain and premiers Friday in North America.

“Netsky-P targets young computer users by sometimes posing as content connected with the Harry Potter books and movie franchise,” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said in a statement. “Parents need to educate their children against the threats of viruses, to ensure the popularity of Potter doesn’t cast a nasty spell on their computer systems.”

The original Netsky worm started spreading in February and quickly spawned more flavors than a Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans package.

The P variant has been particularly successful, though, thanks to engineering that disguises the worm’s payload as one of dozens of potentially tempting files, from Harry Potter content to X-rated photos of Britney Spears.

View full article: Harry Potter and the worm of doom

This download contains sample files for use with the MSDN OfficeTalk column “Easy Task Reports with Outlook and WordProcessingML.” To view the article, click the link in the Related Resources box.

Export Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 task data to XML and use this as a source for reports in Microsoft Office Word 2003. Use Outlook automation in the Microsoft .NET Framework to export task information. Then use XML and XSLT to create documents that display reports of tasks containing their completion percentage, status, and other detail. Then, package the XML/XSLT portion of the solution using an XML expansion pack in Word.

Download: Office 2003 Sample: OfficeTalk: Easy Task Reports with Outlook and WordProcessingML

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of two new Office 2003 Business Intelligence (BI) Accelerators, the Microsoft® Office Business Scorecards Accelerator and the Microsoft Office Excel Add-in for SQL Server (TM) Analysis Services. Designed for and built on the Microsoft Office System and Windows Server System (TM) , the Office BI Accelerators provide customers and partners with increased access to data that is critical to maximizing business performance. Information workers and industry partners can also use the accelerators to assess performance in real time and reshape strategy and redeploy resources as market conditions change, staying one step ahead of their competition. By taking advantage of existing Microsoft technology investments, the accelerators are a cost-effective way for end users and partners to increase their business insight and automate formerly manual business processes, providing greater efficiency, productivity and enhanced decision-making.

“The scorecard project will enable us to manage our business more effectively,” said Bill Bradford, senior vice president of sales and marketing for ON Semiconductor. “The toolset allows for prioritization of key issues and a ‘drive to action,’ so we can allocate resources to achieve our critical goals and objectives faster and with a higher probability of success than ever before.”

Download: Excel 2002/2003 Add-in for SQL Server Analysis Services
Download: Business Scorecards Accelerator

Anti-spam organisation Spamhaus is opening up operations in China with the launch of a new site, Spamhaus.cn, this week.

For some time China has acted a ‘safe-haven’ for spammers offering so-called bullet-proof hosting – in reality, unscrupulous ISPs who pull the plug on spammers when enough complaints are received by their upstream provider. According to Spamhaus, China currently has three of the world’s most spam-friendly ISPs: PCCW, Chinanet in Chongqing, and Chinanet in Guangdong. Foreign spammers (many from the US) have exploited China’s historically lax attitude to junk mail to offshore spam runs to Chinese ISPs.

View full article: Spamhaus assaults ‘Great Wall of Spam’

Exchange Server 2003 Disaster Recovery Operations Guide
This guide explains how to back up and restore the critical data in your Exchange organization.

Exchange Server 2003 High Availability Guide
This guide will help you plan and implement reliable strategies for maintaining a highly available Exchange

Exchange Server 2003 RPC over HTTP Deployment Scenarios
Updated May 2004 to include information for Exchange Server 2003 SP1 release. The SP1 information concerns the new user interface in Exchange System Manager. This guide describes four scenarios for deploying the Windows RPC over HTTP feature in a corporate environment, for both Exchange Server 2003 SP1, and Exchange Server 2003.

Preview: Exchange Server 2003 Disaster Recovery Planning Guide
Exchange Server 2003 Disaster Recovery Planning Guide is an upcoming addition to the Exchange Server 2003 Technical Documentation Library. This is preview content and subject to change.

A store event sink that automatically processes meeting requests for resource mailboxes. The agent checks the availability of the resource mailbox based on the resource’s schedule (not free/busy), and accepts or declines new or updated meeting requests.

Download: Exchange 2003: Auto Accept Agent

These Tips and Tricks show how to perform a number of basic tasks in a Microsoft® Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 environment. They can help you learn to use SharePoint Portal Server and will introduce you to the basic features and principles of portal site navigation and customization. This document is intended to be a desktop reference, but it can also form the basis for self-paced or instructor-led training.

Download: Tips and Tricks for Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003

This one is really nice! Tip: If you have Outlook 2003 as well you can use Search Folders to easily find back your messages in any newsgroup!

This product is a full-function MAPI transport. This means that a news server account works in the same way as an account for Microsoft Exchange Server or a POP3/SMTP account, support remote mail headers and it is managed through common Send/Receive menu.

MAPILab NNTP for Outlook supports all messages formats (plain text, RTF, HTML) and encodings which are supported by Microsoft Outlook. It is fully compatible with (but doesn’t require!) Microsoft Exchange Server and can be used to share newsgroups for coworkers through public folders.

You can download free trial copy and learn more about the product at the product homepage. Trail copy is fully functional during 30-days.

Download: NNTP for Outlook trial
Don’t forget! If you decide to order use “4PM76A8” to get a discount when ordering!

The Local Installation Source Tool is a wizard to help manage your Local Installation Source (LIS) on computers running Microsoft Office 2003. The LIS Tool allows you to enable or disable LIS, and to move the MsoCache folder to a new volume. This download is intended for use by customers and network administrators with LIS issues who contact Microsoft Product Support Services.

Download: Office 2003 Tool: Local Installation Source Tool

Archive 43

This Update Rollup resolves problems that were found in Exchange 2000 since Exchange 2000 SP3 was released.

Download: Update Rollup for Exchange 2000 (KB836488)

Nearly a year after Congress shut down a programme that would have allowed the Pentagon to data mine to read emails, other spy schemes that do the same thing are alive and well and sniffing.
According to a congressional report obtained by Reuters, 36 of the government’s 199 “data mining” efforts collect personal information from the private sector.

Fears that the Pentagon’s $54 million Total Information Awareness program would do just that and kill civil rights resulted in the scheme being culled.

However it seems that all the spooks have done is launch programmes that are remarkably similar including plans to read emails.

According to the report, at least one unnamed agency is mining intelligence reports and Internet searches “to identify foreign terrorists or U.S. citizens connected to foreign terrorism activities”.

View: US Government reads emails

A New York man convicted of using the network of Internet service provider EarthLink Inc. to send out hundreds of millions of unsolicited commercial (spam) e-mail was sentenced to between three-and-a -half and seven years in prison Thursday, according to Brad Maione, a spokesman for New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

Howard Carmack of Buffalo, New York, also known as the “Buffalo Spammer,” was sentenced by senior Erie County Judge Michael D’Amico in Buffalo. The sentence is the first obtained following a conviction using the state’s identity theft law, Maione said.

Carmack was found guilty in April by a jury in Erie County, New York, on 14 counts, including charges that he stole the identity of two Buffalo-area residents, which he then used to send out more than 800 million spam messages, the attorney general’s office said.

View full article: Buffalo spammer gets 3.5 to 7 years

The Data Assistant for PowerPoint 2003 provides an easy-to-use method of inserting and managing graphical data objects such as Microsoft Office Visio® drawings, Microsoft Office Excel charts, and named ranges into PowerPoint presentations.

Download: Microsoft Office Data Assistant for Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® 2003

Among the technology offerings to be previewed at Tech·Ed 2004 this week is the Microsoft® Office Access 2003 Conversion Toolkit, which has proven to greatly streamline conversion of Microsoft Office Access databases and ease deployment of Microsoft Office 2003. The toolkit is scheduled to launch later this summer, in conjunction with the release of Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 1.

Tech·Ed is Microsoft Corp.’s most comprehensive technical event for IT professionals and developers. This year’s event, held May 23–28 at the San Diego Convention Center, marks the largest presence ever for Microsoft Office at the show and demonstrates the group’s commitment to connecting with the developers and IT professional community. Today, Senior Vice President of Microsoft Office Steven Sinofsky will announce the intent to deliver the Microsoft Office Access 2003 Conversion Toolkit later this summer. To get a better understanding of the Microsoft Office Access 2003 Conversion Toolkit, the factors that led to its creation and the benefits it will offer to customers and partners, we spoke with Jon Sigler, group program manager for Microsoft Office Access.

View full Press Release: Q&A: Microsoft Office Access 2003 Conversion Toolkit Will Significantly Streamline Database Conversion and Ease Deployment of Microsoft Office 2003 for Customers

Intelligent Message Filter is based on Microsoft SmartScreen Technology from Microsoft Research. By using e-mail characteristics tracked by SmartScreen technology, Intelligent Message Filter can help determine whether each incoming e-mail message is likely to be spam. Based on this likelihood, you can choose to block e-mail messages at the gateway or at the mailbox store. For more information about Intelligent Message Filter, see Exchange Intelligent Message Filter Overview.

Important: Before installing Intelligent Message Filter, you must read the Microsoft Exchange Intelligent Message Filter Deployment Guide. If you do not configure Intelligent Message Filter correctly, your messaging environment can be negatively affected.

Download: Exchange Intelligent Message Filter
View: Microsoft Exchange Intelligent Message Filter Deployment Guide

Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) offers new updates and improvements to Exchange Server 2003. Enhancements include new language support for Outlook Mobile Access and Microsoft Office Outlook® Web Access spelling checkers, and out-of-office modification, a larger text entry field, search folder support, and improved menu navigation for the Outlook Mobile Access user interface.

Updated deployment tools are included with SP1 to help you with site consolidation. Site consolidation involves moving Exchange servers from remote sites into a larger central site and allowing users in remote offices to access their mailboxes and public folders over the network. Site consolidation provides the following benefits:

The Exchange topology is simplified.
You can administer Exchange centrally and reduce administrative costs.
You can make better use of hardware because there are fewer mailbox servers as well as fewer auxiliary servers. A centralized datacenter can also increase scalability and availability.
Consolidating sites can help your organization reach the goal of running Exchange in native mode by reducing the number of Exchange 5.5 servers in the organization.
With fewer mailbox servers, there are fewer targets for security issues.

Download: Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 1
Download: Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Release Notes

This package contains all the Exchange tools bundled together in a single download. The following tools are included:

Add Root Certificate
Address Rewrite
ArchiveSink
Authoritative Restore
Importer for Lotus cc:Mail Archives
Disable Certificate Verification
DNS Resolver
Error Code Look-up
Exchange Server Stress and Performance 2003
Inter-Organization Replication
Exchange Deployment Tools
Mailbox Merge Wizard (ExMerge)
GUIDGen
Jetstress
Load Simulator 2003
Information Store Viewer (MDBVU32)
Management Pack
MTA Check
SMTP Internet Protocol Restriction and Accept/Deny List Configuration
Up-To-Date Notifications Troubleshooting
WinRoute

Download: Exchange 2003: All-In-One Tools

Cool! The Dutch Spelling Checker bug got fixed!

Office 2003 Dutch Spelling Checker Update for Office Proofing Tools
Office 2003 Dutch Spelling Checker Update for Multilingual User Interface Pack
Under certain circumstances, Office 2003 can quit unexpectedly when the user accesses the Dutch spelling checker. This update corrects that potential error. The Dutch spelling checker is included in Office Proofing Tools.

Word 2003 Update for Multilingual User Interface Pack
This update fixes an issue with the user interface for the Finnish version of Microsoft Office Word 2003.

Access 2003 Danish Update- KB834013 for Multilingual User Interface Pack
This update from Microsoft prevents a potential error. If this error occurs, the three Danish characters Ø, æ and å do not appear correctly in Help while the user is disconnected from the Internet.

This Update Rollup resolves problems that were found in the Exchange 5.5 since Exchange 5.5 SP4 was released.

Download: Update Rollup for Exchange 5.5 (KB841765)

Comcast’s high-speed Internet subscribers have long been rumored to be an unusually persistent source of junk e-mail.

Now someone from Comcast is confirming it. “We’re the biggest spammer on the Internet,” network engineer Sean Lutner said at a meeting of an antispam working group in Washington, D.C., last week.

Lutner said Comcast users send out about 800 million messages a day, but a mere 100 million flow through the company’s official servers. Almost all of the remaining 700 million represent spam erupting from so-called zombie computers–a breathtaking figure that adds up to six or seven spam-o-grams for each American family every day.

View full article: Attack of Comcast’s Internet zombies

After submitting its Caller ID e-mail authentication specification to a standards body, Microsoft is discussing merging its spec with another, called Sender Policy Framework, or SPF.

E-mail experts from Microsoft will spend a weekend meeting with SPF author Meng Weng Wong of Pobox.com, looking for ways to merge the closely-related Caller ID and SPF standards, according to Wong.

“Basically, we’re going to take SPF and Caller-ID and do a ‘cut and paste,'” Wong said Friday, en route to Microsoft headquarters.

View: Full article: Secure E-Mail Specs Could Merge

It’s been nearly six months since President Bush signed the first federal spam law with criminal sanctions–and not one bulk e-mailer has been criminally charged under it so far.

But the FBI told Congress on Thursday that it has “identified over 100 significant spammers” so far and is targeting 50 of the most noxious for potential prosecution later this year.

“Such cases may be investigated and prosecuted as computer intrusion matters, or as online cyberfrauds which may lend themselves to a variety of existing state or federal statutes, including the recently passed Can-Spam Act,” Jana Monroe, the FBI’s assistant director of the cyber division, told the Senate Commerce Committee.

She didn’t offer much in the way of details, except to say that an “initiative is being projected for later this year in which it is anticipated that criminal and civil actions under the Can-Spam Act of 2003 will be included.”

Monroe was among a handful of witnesses to appear before the Senate Commerce Committee in its first look at how the Can-Spam Act has worked since it took effect Jan. 1.

“Since our review of this issue last May, the volume of spam received by American consumers has risen unabatedly,” said committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz. “Spam now accounts for anywhere from 64 percent to 83 percent of all e-mail traffic on the Internet.”

View full article: FBI plans spammer smackdown

This download contains documentation (such as programming references and technical articles), and may contain tools and sample code designed to help you customize the Office Editions and to extend Office Editions and integrate with other applications.

I have to say that I think it’s very cool of them to publish this to the public. This time the paper is even less then 10 pages so it’s actually worth looking at

Detailed information on how the Microsoft IT group backs up its clustered Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 mailbox infrastructure by using a modified version of the Backup feature in Microsoft Windows Server 2003. The modifications enable Microsoft IT to increase throughput and back up the data faster, thereby meeting service level agreements (SLAs) despite the very large quantity of data backed up nightly.

Download: Backup Process Used with Clustered Exchange Server 2003 Servers at Microsoft

Archive 42

Microsoft Solutions for Security: The Antivirus Defense-in-Depth Guide provides an easy to understand overview of the assorted types of malware, their risks, characteristics, means of replication and payloads. The solution also details the considerations for implementing a comprehensive antivirus defense for your network, servers and clients which goes beyond simply installing antivirus software into the related tools which will help reduce your risk of infection. Lastly, the solution provides a comprehensive methodology for quickly and effectively responding to outbreaks or incidents when they occur.

Download: The Antivirus Defense-in-Depth Guide

The Information Bridge Framework is a set of tools, technologies, and prescriptive guidance used to build solutions that facilitate easy, efficient connections between the Microsoft Office applications and enterprise line-of-business information. This presentation provides a technical overview of the Information Bridge Framework including solutions, the Information Bridge Framework components, and the typical scenarios for solutions in the enterprise. Subsequent sections present technical detail on the Information Bridge Framework and describe the development process.

The title says it all; I added a section to my website! This section is all about add-ins; third party applications that increase the functionality of Outlook.

With this new section I would also like to welcome MAPILab as my new sponsor. As is the case with my current sponsor –Sperry Software– the same is true for MAPILab; visitors of https://dev.howto-outlook.com/can get their add-ins with a discount! To get the discount simply place your order and use the following code;

Sperry Software (discount code “BH93RF24”)
MAPILab (coupon code “4PM76A8”)

Just a couple of examples of the add-ins provided;

Sperry Software

For the complete list of available add-ins go to https://dev.howto-outlook.com/addins

I hope you’ll enjoy the new section and the addins provided there! If you provide Outlook addins yourself and want to be listed in the add-in section as well send an e-mail to me.

Forbes magazine puts a dollar figure on the Seattle, Washington-area native’s net worth — $46.6 billion in 2003 — and crowned him the world’s richest person for the seventh year in a row.

His company, Microsoft, reports that it raked in $32.19 billion in revenues for the fiscal year ending in June 2003, ranking it among Fortune’s top 50 largest U.S.-based corporations.

And by donating $600 million a year and creating a charitable foundation with a $26 billion endowment, Gates is the world’s largest private giver, according to The Washington Post.

His trademark glasses and restrained speech notwithstanding, most everything about Gates is big — his business, wealth and philanthropy. He’s a hero to some; a reviled monopolist to others.

“I think we are a little bit like the Yankees in that we’ve got a good track record, and sometimes people get a kick out of saying if we don’t win, ‘Hey, that’s fascinating, why didn’t they win?'” Gates said in late March 2004 of Microsoft, according to the high-tech publication eWeek.

The son of an attorney and a schoolteacher, Gates began computer programming in 1968, when he was 13. He entered Harvard in 1973, where he befriended future Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Gates developed a version of the BASIC computer language for the first microcomputer, the MITS Altair, during his stint at Harvard.

Gates left college in his junior year and launched Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen. As the personal computer market exploded, so did Microsoft, growing into the industry leader in computer software.

Read full article: Gates thinks big, gives big

Disc jockey discovered creating fiscal budgets in Excel. Graphic designer found using PowerPoint® for new-business pitches. Available today, Microsoft® Office 2004 for Mac helps Mac customers get in touch with their inner business suit to take care of business more efficiently, leaving more time for the pursuit of passions. In addition, Microsoft Corp. today announced that the popular Office 2004 Test Drive offers Mac users the opportunity to take this latest version for a free spin for 30 days.

“Office 2004 offers a new level of productivity never seen before on the Mac platform, and now users can try it free for 30 days before they buy it,” said Tim McDonough, director of marketing and business development for the Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) at Microsoft. “Office 2004 is packed with the tools to help Mac users work more efficiently. We all want to get our work done and move on to the fun things in life.”

Office 2004 for Mac Standard and Student and Teacher editions are now available at major resellers nationwide, including The Apple store (http://www.apple.com/) and Apple’s retail stores CompUSA, MacConnection, MacMall and Mac Zone. Consumers can check http://www.microsoft.com/mac/ for more information and links to resellers.

“We are excited about the availability of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac, the most innovative version of Office yet,” said Ron Okamoto, vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations at Apple Computer Inc. “Office 2004 offers many Mac-only and Mac-first features, making it a great productivity suite for consumers, professionals, educators and students.”

Office 2004 was built to help Mac users work smarter by offering better ways to manage information, share ideas and create documents. The following Office 2004 features, announced today, are designed to help Office users seamlessly share their ideas, whether collaborating with other Mac users or across platforms.

View full Press Release: Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Spotted Helping Customers Work Smarter to Play Harder
View: online Flash demo of the tools and other Office 2004 features

New FTC rule requiring pornographic e-mail to be labelled takes effect.

U.S. e-mail users who have resigned themselves to being shocked by eye-popping pornographic messages in their inboxes can expect some relief, as federal legislation governing sexually explicit unsolicited commercial e-mail takes effect.

New Rules
In April, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission adopted the rule, part of the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act, which requires spam containing sexually oriented material to contain the label “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” in the subject line. The FTC likened the requirement to putting an electronic “brown paper wrapper” around raunchy spam. Spammers who ignore the law risk fines, the FTC said.

The rule is designed to protect e-mail recipients from graphic and unsolicited sexual images. The labels make it easier to spot and filter out such messages before they land in a recipient’s inbox. In addition to the label, explicit spam must include a valid postal address for the sender, the FTC said.

The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act was signed into law by President Bush on December 16, 2003 and required the FTC to adopt a mark or notice identifying sexually explicit spam within 120 days after passage.

The final rule, which goes into effect Wednesday, reflects feedback from the public on the label, which was originally supposed to read “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT-CONTENT,” but later shortened to allow more of the e-mail subject line to be readable, the FTC said.

Spammers Snagged
In April, the FTC announced the first criminal cases stemming from violations of CAN-SPAM. Two alleged spammers, Phoenix Avatar of Detroit and Global Web Promotions of Australia and New Zealand, were charged with violating CAN-SPAM and other federal laws governing false advertising when they used e-mail messages to market bogus human growth hormone and diet patch products.

Spam allegedly sent by the two companies was responsible for more than 889,000 consumer complaints to the FTC between January 1 and April 24, the largest numbers of complaints about any alleged spammers, the FTC said.

View: Porn Spam Gets Canned

This download provides sample files for use with the MSDN Article “Custom Calendar Providers for Outlook 2003.” To view the article, click the link available from the Related Resources box.

Stephen Toub walks you through customizing native Outlook integration with the Lists Web service from Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services to build a custom Web application that actually serves up custom data instead of that from an events list.

Download: Outlook 2003 Sample: Custom Calendar Providers for Outlook 2003

This download gives you the ability to create your own PowerPoint 2003 design templates incorporating custom backgrounds. The Template Creation Wizard allows you to create new design templates using custom images as title master and slide master backgrounds.

Download: PowerPoint 2003 Add-in: Template Creation Wizard

Bulked up by a recent arrest in the Sasser worm case, Microsoft is confident that the creators of the infamous MyDoom and Blaster worms will be brought to justice.

On Tuesday, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Nancy Anderson said the software giant’s $5 million reward program is beginning to pay off–and future arrests are likely.

Anderson said Microsoft provided technical assistance to the FBI, Secret Service and German authorities that led to the arrest on Saturday of the teenager believed to be responsible for creating both the Sasser and Netsky worms that infected millions of PCs. Information leading to the arrest resulted in part from Microsoft’s antivirus reward program.

“Since November, a number of individuals have come forward providing information about worms and malicious code being distributed,” Anderson said, adding that the FBI is pleased with the quality of information received after the program was launched last fall. “They have ongoing investigations, and we do expect [more arrests]. These are truly criminal activities,” she said.

On Saturday, May 7, German authorities arrested 18-year old Sven Jaschan for allegedly creating five variants of the Sasser worm that crippled millions of systems in early May and 28 variants of the Netsky worm. The teen’s mother owns a computer store, PC-Help, in the small town of Waffensen, AP reported.

View full article: Microsoft Confident Reward System Will Lead To Arrest of Blaster, MyDoom Writers

Creating and selecting a signature is not that difficult in Outlook. However creating the signature you want with for example a company logo in it can be quite of a hassle. Lately quite a number of posts in the newsgroups were regarding signatures. Therefore I thought it would be nice to create a guide that will cover both the basics and advanced examples on creating a signature in Outlook. The guide covers the following;

Signature basics

Creating separate signatures for Plain Text, HTML and Rich Text formatted mail
Creating an HTML signature with a picture/company logo
Creating a company wide signature/disclaimer with Exchange
Random Quote Insert

With that comes a FAQ article which explains why sometimes your signature ends up double spaced.

View How To article: Creating Signatures
View FAQ Article: Signatures Appear Double Spaced

A 21-year-old man who was arrested in Germany last Friday and charged with creating a malicious computer program called Agobot was released from police custody.

The man, who has not been named, was being held following his arrest because of fears he might flee the country. He was required to surrender identity papers and report regularly to police as a condition of his release, said police spokesman Ullrich Heffner.

German police arrested the man in the southern town of Waldshut and charged him under the country’s computer sabotage law for attacks on computers in Germany, the UK and the US linked to Agobot and Phatbot.

Five other men were also charged in connection to the so-called Trojan programs, but were not taken into custody, according to Horst Haug, a spokesman for the State Bureau of Investigation in Baden-Württemberg.

View full article: German police release Agobot Trojan author

This online book provides important information about using Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003. The purpose of this book is to outline the new features in Exchange Server 2003 and provide the basic information necessary to begin using these new features. This is not a comprehensive document about Exchange, but a guide for getting started with testing and running Exchange 2003.
This book supplements the release notes (releasenotes.htm), and should be read only after reviewing the release notes. The release notes contain critical information about known issues with Exchange 2003.
This book is designed to benefit Exchange administrators who will be testing and deploying Exchange 2003. Furthermore, this book assumes that you have an excellent working knowledge of Exchange 2000. Its structure is based on Exchange components; specifically, each chapter itemizes the new component features and discusses how to begin using them.

Download: What’s New in Exchange Server 2003

Transmeta Corporation (Nasdaq:TMTA), the leader in efficient computing, today announced that its Efficeon microprocessor family will offer increased protection against many of the most common types of virus and worm attacks. This capability will be provided in conjunction with the Execution Protection feature shipping from Microsoft in the forthcoming Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). New Efficeon processors scheduled to ship in mid-year 2004 and beyond will include “No Execute” (commonly known as “NX”) support as a standard feature.

In response to the growing threat of malicious virus and worm attacks on the Internet, Microsoft has announced plans for an upcoming release of Windows XP SP2, which will feature an integral virus protection feature known as Execution Protection, enabled only on systems with specific processor support. The Efficeon processor will provide this capability to protect against the execution of code from memory regions intended for data.

“Transmeta’s support for ‘No Execute,’ working in conjunction with the safety features of Microsoft’s Windows XP SP2, will significantly reduce computer vulnerability to some of the most prevalent malicious code attacks,” said Matthew R. Perry, President and CEO of Transmeta Corporation. “Our release of cutting edge features aligned with Microsoft’s release of Windows XP SP2 yields a crucial solution for the future of computer security.”

Transmeta is providing advance versions of Efficeon-based systems with “No Execute” support to Microsoft this month for internal evaluation and use.

View full article: Transmeta Efficeon Defends Against Virus and Worm Attacks on Microsoft Windows XP

A California federal court has dissolved a restraining order against SpamCop.net, just a day after ordering the antispam service to stop warning warn ISPs about complaints of spam coming from their networks.

Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California dissolved a temporary restraining order against IronPort Systems, which owns SpamCop, according to a statement Wednesday from IronPort.

The judge granted the order Monday in a case pitting IronPort against online marketing company OptInRealBig.com. Attorneys for OptInRealBig asked for an immediate injunction against SpamCop, saying SpamCop’s reports have caused OptInRealBig to lose contracts with ISPs and customers.

After analyzing opposition papers filed by IronPort after the injunction, the judge decided that “the interests of justice favor dissolution” of the order, the company says.

View full article: Court Reverses Pro-Spam Rule

Sean : Alex, thanks for giving us a few minutes. Tell us what this stuff is all about.

Alex : About a year ago we took MapPoint, our mapping technology product and converted it to a web service so that application developers can drag and drop a literal XML web service into their applications. You send the address information and we’ll send you back a map, you send a latitude – longitude, we’ll send you back a map. So it’s an over the network service that is being leveraged by Dollar Rent-A-Car and MSN Autos and others that want driving directions on a web site and instead of having localized information, they can pull it over the network as a service.

So what we did at that point was about two months ago we announces a product called MapPoint Location Server. The MapPoint Location Server again is what will take this to the next level. Typically we would have installed MapPoint on multiple desktops to make an application but now you can draw from a web service.

Read the full interview: MapPoint and Location Services discussion with Alex Nanos of Microsoft Canada

Archive 41

The download includes a set of files required to build and install a minimal Office System 2003 bilingual translation dictionary, available by using the research pane.

This tool accompanies the article, “Add a Bilingual Translation Dictionary Service to Microsoft Office System” available on MSDN. (available when clicking the download link)

The Translation Dictionaries article enables Microsoft’s partners – be they specialized ISVs or dictionary publishers – to create additional bilingual dictionaries and deliver these to users of Office within the familiar Office interface. With the help of this resource, partners can adapt dictionary content they already own and integrate it completely into Office 2003.

Once the new dictionary content is ready, the partner makes this available to the user for a one-time installation (e.g. from CD or the Web) to their hard drive. The user can then access it in the same way as the bilingual dictionaries which ship with Office 2003, i.e. through the Research Pane or by simply right-clicking on the word to be translated.

Download: Office 2003 Tool: Add a Bilingual Translation Dictionary Service to the Microsoft Office System

Detailed discussion about the design and deployment of the Microsoft IT hosted collaboration platform. The platform supports personal storage, team Web sites, group and division portals, and enterprise services. With server farms centralized in three regional data centers, Microsoft saves both hardware and support costs.

Download: Deploying SharePoint Products and Technologies for Enterprise Collaboration

The file Migrate.sql that was included on the Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 CD in the \SUPPORT\DATABASE folder does not support partitioning the Project Server database across multiple database servers when there are also multiple code pages across the database servers.

This download updates the file Migrate.sql and allows the Project Server 2003 database to be partitioned across multiple database servers that have multiple code pages.

The updated Migrate.sql supports all Project Server 2003 languages and is recommended to be used instead of the file included on the Project Server 2003 CD for all languages. The updated Migrate.sql is required for:

Any deployment using Hebrew.
Any deployment using more than one code page across partitioned database servers.

Download: Project Server 2003: UPDATED MIGRATE.SQL

This update resolves a newly-discovered vulnerability. A remote code execution vulnerability exists in the Help and Support Center because of the way that it handles HCP URL validation. The vulnerability is documented in the Vulnerability Details section of this bulletin.

An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system, including installing programs; viewing, changing, or deleting data; or creating new accounts that have full privileges. However, significant user interaction is required to exploit this vulnerability.

Important: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS04-015.mspx
Run: Windows Update

Download the construction update to keep your maps current. Save the file in the Data folder, located where you installed the program files for MapPoint or Streets & Trips. For example C:\Program Files\Microsoft MapPoint\Data\

Download: MapPoint 2004 Streets and Trips Construction Update 2004
Download: MapPoint 2003 Streets and Trips Construction Update 2003
Download: MapPoint 2002 Streets and Trips Construction Update 2002
Download: MapPoint 2001 Streets and Trips Construction Update 2001

This tool will help to remove the Sasser (A-E) worm from infected systems. Once the tool has run—after the End-User License Agreement (EULA) is accepted—it automatically checks for infection and removes any of the targeted worms that are found.

Download: Sasser (A-E) Worm Removal Tool

Microsoft Corp. today commended German law enforcement for its prompt arrest relating to the Sasser worm and confirmed that the company’s anti-virus reward program investigators had worked with informants on the case during the past week. German authorities were able to arrest the alleged perpetrator of the Sasser worm within seven days of its launch, based on fast action by local police and broad cooperation among German law enforcement agencies, the FBI and Secret Service in the United States, and Microsoft.

Brad Smith, senior vice president and general counsel at Microsoft, confirms with reporters an arrest in Germany of the alleged perpetrator of the Sasser worm virus.

“As this case demonstrates, we will move quickly to support law enforcement worldwide to identify and hold responsible those who break the law by launching viruses and worms targeted at our customers,” said Brad Smith, senior vice president and general counsel at Microsoft. “The information leading to this arrest resulted in part from Microsoft’s anti-virus reward program, as well as new technical and investigative techniques we have developed during the past year to address precisely this type of situation.”

Microsoft entered into a partnership last November to create a $5 million anti-virus reward program, supporting Interpol, the FBI, and the Secret Service. Aware of this program, certain individuals in Germany approached Microsoft investigators last week, offered to provide information about the creator of the Sasser virus, and inquired about their potential eligibility for a reward. Microsoft informed the individuals that the company would consider providing a reward of up to $250,000 if their information led to the arrest and conviction of the Sasser perpetrator.

View full Press Release: Microsoft Reward Program Helps Lead to Information Resulting in Arrest Related to Sasser Internet Worm

Exchange Server 2003 Security Hardening Guide
This book guides you through the process of hardening your Exchange 2003 environment, including configuration recommendations and strategies for combating external threats.

Exchange Server 2003 Performance and Scalability Guide
This guide provides information about Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 performance and scalability.

Preview: Making Your Exchange 2003 Organization Fault Tolerant
“Exchange Server 2003 High Availability Guide” is an upcoming addition to the Exchange Server 2003 Technical Documentation Library. This preview chapter provides information about how to maximize the fault tolerance of you Exchange 2003 messaging system.

Slowing and Stopping E-Mail Viruses in an Exchange 2003 Environment
This document provides you with recommendations on how to fortify an Exchange environment against e-mail transmitted viruses and worms. Resources for the implementation details related to the recommendations are included. Suggestions are given on what to do when a virus attack occurs.

There were a number of bug fixes made to several of the add-ins, especially right around the time that Microsoft released Service Pack 3 for Outlook 2002 (more on that below). Here’s the list of recent bug fixes and version numbers;

Add Email Address v2.2.4 – Corrected problem when using custom categories under Outlook 2003.
Always BCC v1.4.1 – Similar to the above problem, two emails were being sent when using Word as the email editor.
Auto Print v2.2.7 – Fixed bug when printing multiple attachments all having the same name.
Follow Up Reminder v1.1.3 – Fixed a bug that caused two emails to be sent when using Word as the email editor.
Insert Date/Time v2.0.8 – Corrected intermittent problem that reported “InsertDateTime.AddMenuHook”, “Type Mismatch”.
Print On Demand v1.4.1 – Fixed a bug that caused HTML emails to list the attachments in one long line and also added the ability to clip the number of email addresses shown (to avoid wasting paper).
Random Quote Insert v2.0.0 – Added a button to the Outlook toolbar to allow insertion of quotes whenever they’re wanted not just when the email is sent.
Reply To All v1.0.26 – Fixed a bug that prevented the Reply To All Self Removal feature from working when the Reply To All Confirmation button was checked and HTML emails were the default format. Also fixed the bug where multiple copies of the email were saved (one in the Sent Items, one in the Outbox).
VCard Converter v1.0.8 – Corrected a bug that prevented the vcf files from being written to the save folder that the user picked, when the user did not assign a save folder immediately.
Watch Outlook Folders v1.4.5 – Forced notification message windows to be “on top” of other windows, even if Outlook is minimized.

To get these latest versions, just go back to your original order email to get the URL locations and download the add-ins again. It is necessary to uninstall the current version first, by going to Control Panel…Add/Remove Programs. Find the add-in in the list and select “Remove”. Then, install the new one by double clicking on the installation file. Outlook should be closed during this process. By the way, you can tell what version you currently have by going to Tools…Options, then finding the add-in in the list of tabs. The version number is in the Support frame.

Interested in Sperry Software add-ins? Just click here. If you see anything you like use “BH93RF24” to get a discount when ordering!

Look to late May for a bounty of new messaging tools from Microsoft, including the release of the IMF and the first service and feature pack for Exchange Server 2003.

The Intelligent Messaging Filter [IMF] will be released later this month, likely at Microsoft’s TechEd conference in San Diego, said Edward Wu, a product manager for Exchange Server at Microsoft, during a Webcast hosted by the company.

Wu said Microsoft is still reviewing whether IMF will be offered only to customers with Software Assurance, as it was originally intended, or whether it will be made available to all customers. A decision is expected at TechEd, he said.

The software runs on Exchange 2003 and uses the same Smartscreen technology that was recently added to Outlook 2003, MSN and Hotmail. IMF uses Bayesian analysis to learn to identify spam, and considers the whole message, not just a few key words, to identify spam.

The messaging filter has been in a limited beta for several months. It will come as welcome relief to enterprise customers who continue to fight the deluge of spam that flood their corporate networks.

“No one is satisfied with the antispam tools available today,” said Lee Benjamin, a consultant and chairman of the Exchange Server Boston User Group. “No vendor has a clear product strategy that deals with the problem.”

Wu also said Exchange Server 2003 will see its first service pack at the end of May. The service pack will be released in two parts. SP1 will contain the bug fixes and a second Web release will contain the new features.

View full article: Spam filter, Exchange 2003 SP1 to launch at TechEd

Geared toward the experienced IT administrator, this book shows you how to configure and manage Exchange Server 2003 organizations and servers. It also explains how to set up and use recipient policies, messaging, client access, mailbox and public folder stores, and Exchange clusters. It includes detailed appendixes on Exchange tools, services, store management, folder replication, and full-text indexing.

Download: Exchange Server 2003 Administration Guide

This tool will help to remove the Sasser (A-D) worm from infected systems. Once the tool has run—after the End-User License Agreement (EULA) is accepted—it automatically checks for infection and removes any of the targeted worms that are found.

After running, the tool displays a message describing the outcome of the detection and removal process. The tool can be safely deleted after it has run. Also, the tool creates a log file named sasscln.log in the %WINDIR%\debug folder.

Download: Sasser (A-D) Worm Removal Tool

Microsoft Corp. and IronPort Systems Inc. today announced initial success with the Bonded Sender Program, IronPort’s legitimate e-mail sender program to reduce the deluge of unwanted e-mail sent to Microsoft® customers. For the past five months, Microsoft has worked with IronPort Systems’s Bonded Sender Program (http://www.bondedsender.com/ ) legitimate e-mail sender program on its MSN® and MSN Hotmail® platforms. The Bonded Sender program, powered by IronPort and certified by TRUSTe, identifies legitimate senders of e-mail based on their adherence to program standards and the posting of a financial bond.

Programs such as safe lists reputation, rating and e-mail accreditation have emerged to help prevent good e-mail from accidentally being blocked by filters. Such programs reinforce the importance of allowing legitimate marketers to communicate with their customers and help ensure that customers can correspond with institutions and organizations such as banks, political groups and retailers. These approaches are the inverse of the early e-mail-blocking lists and avoid many of the pitfalls associated with those lists. Microsoft continues to evaluate a variety of programs for potential implementation on its MSN and Hotmail platforms.

“Because spam is our e-mail customers’ No. 1 complaint today, our technology arsenal must include a process that works in tandem with our filters to differentiate good e-mail from junk e-mail,” said Ryan Hamlin, general manager of the Anti-Spam Technology and Strategy Group at Microsoft. “Bonded Sender is an example of a program that effectively raises the bar on conduct for good e-mail senders, while simultaneously helping recipients such as Microsoft identify important messages that consumers have requested.”

View full press release: Microsoft Offers Anti-Spam Capabilities to Distinguish Legitimate E-Mail

Microsoft (Quote, Chart) is working on a plan to include worm removal tools in a new feature called Microsoft Update that’s on schedule for release by this year’s end.

With the proliferation of destructive worms like Blaster, NetSky and Sasser escalating daily to pose an ever-greater threat to home users, Microsoft plans to release the new Microsoft Update as part of the larger Windows Update patch management platform.

Depending on the threat level of malicious worms, the software giant will automate the worm removal process. This goes beyond Microsoft’s latest moves to create disinfection tools to deal with major virus outbreaks.

Earlier this year, Microsoft distributed a detection and removal tool for Windows XP and Windows 2000 machines infected by the Blaster virus. The tool was released as a 317 KB download (3 to 5 minutes for dial-up connections) after ISPs complained that infected home users were “actively transmitting” the worm.

Last weekend, when the Sasser worm and several mutants started exploiting the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) vulnerability, Microsoft again released a removal tool for customers.

However, as security experts have repeatedly warned, home users need to be actively prodded into applying software fixes. A Microsoft spokesperson told internetnews.com that the company’s long term security vision was outlined in a recent executive e-mail issued by Chairman Bill Gates, where “significant investments” in four key areas were identified.

View full article: MS to Help Zap Worms Automatically

Dealing with widespread worms like Sasser raises the cost of using Windows, a research analyst said Wednesday.
Mark Nicolett, research director at Gartner, recommended that enterprises boost spending on patch management and intrusion prevention software to keep ahead of worms, which are appearing ever sooner after vulnerabilities in Windows are disclosed.

“This is part of the carrying cost of using Windows,” said Nicolett. “The cost of a Windows environment has gone up because enterprises have to install security patches very rapidly, deal with outages caused by secondary problems with these patches, and deploy additional layers of security technology.”

Although he placed some caveats on his numbers, Nicolett said that informal surveys with Gartner clients indicate that simply moving from a no rapid patch deployment capability to an ongoing process that can respond quickly to vulnerabilities raises the cost of using business by about 15 percent.

View full article: Gartner: Worms Jack Up the Total Cost of Windows