Microsoft says it has a fix for a bug that was keeping Office 2003 users from being able to access some rights-managed files.
The bug, which cropped up on Friday, meant that users of Office 2003 were unable to access files protected using Microsoft's rights management service (RMS) technology.
Microsoft posted a software download known as a "hotfix" on Saturday that it says resolves the issue.
"The issue of the inability to open Office 2003 documents protected with RMS has now been resolved with a hotfix," Microsoft said in a short statement on its Office sustained engineering blog.
I'm still trying to get more details on what caused the bug and will update things if I hear more.
Update, 11:22 a.m. PT: Microsoft said the problem was due to an Office 2003 certificate that expired. "This resulted in Office 2003 customers not being able to open Office 2003 documents protected with the Active Directory Rights Management Service (AD RMS) or Rights Management Services (RMS)," a representative said, adding that Microsoft first learned of the issue on Thursday night and had the fix up by Mid-day Saturday.
Encryption certificates were first introduced with Office 2003. "At that time, Microsoft believed it was important to establish short-term expiration dates for these certificates to allow us to re-evaluate and update (rights management) capabilities based on new, more sophisticated encryption technology," Microsoft said.
"The original intent was to refresh and strengthen the certificate over time to keep up with newer technology," the representative said. "We have not done a thorough post-mortem on this incident since we were very focused on fixing the problem. Looking ahead, we are exploring long-term solutions that will prevent something like this from happening again in the future."
Some users of an older version of Microsoft Office may find that their protected documents are now not only protected, but completely inaccessible.
Microsoft warned on Friday that a glitch is causing users of Office 2003 to be unable to access files protected using Microsoft's Rights Management Service.
The software maker acknowledged the bug on its Office Sustained Engineering blog and said it is working to fix the issue.
Starting on December 11, 2009, customers using Office 2003 will not be able to open Office 2003 documents protected with the Rights Management Service (RMS) or save Office 2003 documents protected with RMS. The following error message may be displayed when attempting to Open RMS Documents using Office 2003:"Unexpected error occurred. Please try again later or contact your system administrator"
This symptom affects Office 2003 products used in conjunction with RMS, including Word 2003, Excel 2003, PowerPoint 2003, and Outlook 2003. It does not affect Office 2007.
We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we will provide customers a solution as soon as we can. Any new updates and we will post the information here.
The issue was noted earlier on Friday by the Technologizer blog.
Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that it is looking into an issue in which users of Internet Explorer 6 are forced into having Bing as their default search engine.
"We are aware of the issue with Bing on machines running IE6 and are investigating a solution," Microsoft said in a statement. "This issue is not impacting IE7 and IE8 users."
Although it is only affecting its older browser, many people still use IE6 and Microsoft has faced a lot of over how default search preferences are set and changed within Internet Explorer.
The issue crops up just as Microsoft plans to formally launch Bing. Among its planned promotions is a huge ad campaign as well as an event Tuesday night at Seattle's Space Needle.
The IE6 issue was noted earlier on Tuesday by Search Engine Land.
Adobe has pulled from its Web site an update to Photoshop Lightroom after discovering the new version can cause at least three errors.
In a posting on its Web site, Adobe says that users should not move to version 1.4 and those who have are advised to go back to the older version.
"Those Lightroom users who have installed Lightroom 1.4 should uninstall the update and install Lightroom 1.3.1 until a further update can be provided," Adobe said. Among the errors are a time stamp bug as well as an error in the way files are converted to the DNG (Digital Negative) format. A third issue affects converting Olympus JPEG files to other formats.
Two of the three bugs affect both Windows and Mac versions of Lightroom, while one error occurs only in the Windows version. Both Windows and Mac copies of version 1.4 have been taken down from Adobe's site.
When daylight saving time came two weeks early this year, there was concern that there might be a host of problems. There were some, but like the Y2K bug, there was not widespread mayhem and chaos as the movie-of-the-week industry might have hoped.
But Congress didn't just spring forward a little early this year. It's also is making us wait a week longer to fall back. Instead of changing this past weekend, we don't go back until next weekend. I thought most of the gadgets would know, but it appears not all of them got the message.
At least from a quick survey of folks in the newsroom, minor glitches still seemed to abound. One of our editors got in her family's Mercedes C320 on Sunday and was surprised to find herself ahead of schedule. "We were startled," she said. "We thought we were suddenly an hour early."
Another co-worker had his Treo shift back to daylight saving time. As a result, he set all his clocks back an hour and strolled into work a bit late Monday, though looking quite well rested. He realized something was amiss when he noticed his neighbors leaving for work an hour earlier than normal. "The extra hour of sleep was awesome," he said. (For the record, Palm did post an update to its Web site some time ago to fix the issue.)
Yet another colleague was woken an hour early by his BlackBerry Curve, which he uses as an alarm clock. Other BlackBerry-toters also reported issues, though RIM has also been posting warnings on its Web site.
Meanwhile in Baltimore, some of the city's parking meters fell back too soon, leading to unwarranted tickets, though the city won't make people pay for the meters' malfunction.
Got any good stories of gadgets that missed the mark? E-mail me or post them below.
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