Microsoft

  • Windows 2000 Password Recovery

    The other day I had a server that no one could access. It wasn't actually being used or anything, but the company has been talking about using a server for a while, so it seemed to make sense to see if the one they had could actually be…

  • Outlook Error 0x80040600

    I just ran into this bizarre error in Outlook, that told me absolutely nothing – the detail says Unknown Error (it also refers to a messaging interface). This particular beauty came up while sending and receiving while I was trying it – may have occurred at other times…

  • Manually Remove a Windows Service

    I needed to remove some services the other day and could not recall the name of the tool that allows you to easily add and remove services from Windows. I think it's srvany.exe, but I have no idea how recently it has been updated, and I couldn't find…

  • To Click or not to Click

    This week has been really busy. I feel like I have accomplished exactly nothing all week. But I have been insanely busy just doing things. There are people all over talking about Getting Things Done, and while I suspect that the system is a good one, I know…

  • Microsoft Speaks the Truth

    I think, perhaps, that truer words have never been spoken by an email application. The Microsoft Outlook Test Message is apparently sent to the Junk E-mail folder. By Outlook itself. You would think that somewhere along the way this would not make it through the Quality Assurance process….

  • RPC Over HTTP on SBS 2003

    Wow. That's a mouthful. For those who aren't aware, it stands for Remote Procedure Call (RPC) over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) on (Windows) Small Business Server 2003. Essentially, making an Exchange RPC connection via standard HTTP protocols, over a secure (SSL) connection. I had been royally frustrated with…

  • Outlook Web Access Stinks

    Actually, I rather like Outlook Web Access (OWA). But sometimes I just don't get the folks at Microsoft. OWA is setup in such a way that you can store distribution lists (lists of email addresses) in a contacts folder. That part is okay. But if you happen to…

  • Open Access List Permission

    I think the final piece of the puzzle was the Open Access List permission. It's quite possible that this was in place before I mucked about with the address lists and caused my problems. Nonetheless, after overcoming the mailbox permission fiasco, average users were still unable to use…

  • Excel Number to Text Macro

    I had a pretty hefty spreadsheet of contacts that I wanted to post into Outlook. The problem is that the phone numbers were stored in Excel as numbers and Outlook doesn't like importing numbers into that field. Not sure what the folks at Microsoft expected, perhaps they are…

  • Mismatched Mailbox Madness

    So now that I resolved the issue about the bookmark not being valid, I made may way carefully (and rather suddenly) to the next error: "The name could not be matched to a name in the address list". I swear there are days that I wish I had…