RTL Plain Text emails with Outlook 2007 – fixed

Finally, a long term solution to a problem that have been annoying quite a while…

Outlook 2007 + Plain Text replies , that uses Right to Left languages , in my case Hebrew, were received reversed in order .. that is the words in the sentences were displayed literally reversed.

A quite annoying word issue actually… A workaround for this was making sure that users were sending out Rich Text (RTF) email’s. then the replies were displayed correctly.

Long story short. to solve this, request and install the following patch http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973401 –
Description of the Word 2007 hotfix package (Word-x-none.msp, Wordconv-x-none.msp): August 25, 2009

Additional configuration to align the text to the right could be done by following daniel’s petri post regarding this :

http://www.petri.co.il/correcting-email-display-direction-in-outlook.htm

This solved my issue on the spot.

Better later then never 🙂

Prevent Outlook Anywhere (aka RPC over HTTP) from being automatically configured in Exchange 2007 with autodiscover

Update #2 – July 28th 2014 –

Removing the EXPR while Autodiscover is being utilized (which is probably the case in most deployments) will achieve preventing Outlook Anywhere from being used.

With that being said, a few commentators stated that they would like to continue using Outlook Anywhere and with Autodiscover enabled and the EXPR removed this will result in constant “removal” of the Outlook Anywhere settings that were statically configured.

If you want only specific users to be able to use Outlook Anywhere while others don’t I would advice considering the Set-CasMailbox -MAPIBlockOutlookRpcHttp:$true cmdlet to allow/block specific users.

UpdateJune 29th 2013 –

If you’re going to deploy Exchange 2013 anytime soon – work your way to adapt autodiscover, and bring back the EXPR value. See Exchange 2013 Outlook Anywhere Considerations for more.

This is an unsupported method, use at your own risk!

Once “Outlook Anywhere” is configured on a client access server an EXPR entry is created. Then the autodiscover application picks up the change and publish it, along with the url’s for OAB,EWS & Availability.
This basically “force” the automatic propagation of settings into the profile, including the checkbox for “Connect to Microsoft Exchange using HTTP” and filling the information for the HTTP proxy and authentication methods.

Microsoft documented Deployment Considerations for the Autodiscover Service in:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997633(EXCHG.80).aspx – Where only Site Affinity is can be configured.

The Outlook provider setting and autodiscover relation are referenced quite good in the Exchange team blog:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/09/26/449908.aspx

A client of mine needed the possibility to disable the automatic propagation of the  “Connect to Microsoft Exchange using HTTP” setting in an Exchange 2007 environment .
he did of course wanted to keep the ability to connect using “Outlook Anywhere”  if desired when configuring that manually.

Because autodiscover was made to auto-configure clients that are inside & outside the corporate network disabling this feature disables the ability for external outlook clients, that not domain joined to automatically connect using “Outlook Anywhere” . it does, however does not affect the configuration of a profile.

Within the exchange shell:
Get-outlookprovider –identity EXPR | remove-outlookprovider
Once this is done, recycle the application pool of AutoDiscover in IIS.

This solution will keep the outlook clients from automatically propagate the settings for “Outlook Anywhere” , but retains the possibility for configuring it manually.
All web services and autodiscover information other then the proxy information itself are intact.

Updates (Thanks for all commentators)

New-OutlookProvider -Name:EXPR

I have done the required testing to make sure this solution works.

This is an unsupported method, use at your own risk!

Prevent users from changing the permissions settings on their mailbox folders in Outlook 2003/2007

From a thread I’ve took part in, there are currently no settings in the official office 2003/2007 ADM packs to control this setting.

Here’s the registry how to:

For Outlook 2003:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948894
1, Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2, Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice11.0OutlookOptionsFolders
3, On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4, Type DisableEditPermissions, and then press ENTER.
5, Right-click DisableEditPermissions, and then click Modify.
6, In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
7, Exit Registry Editor.

For Outlook 2007, that is HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice12.0OutlookOptionsFolders

Manual creation of the ADM is required, i might post it later on.

Scripting sharepoint lists “Connect to Outlook” stssync links

I was asked to figure this out, took me a while but i found quite a nice approach to make it super easy.

The official Technet on the matter,  explains the how to phrase the stssync link correctly , after fighting with it..unicode etc.. i finally though of something easy.

1. Locate the list you want to connect to.

2. Press “connect to outlook” button.

3. Approve in outlook…

4. Right click the newly added list & choose share “List name”

5. Mail the share offer to yourself .. then check out the message headers.

6. Notice the “x-sharing-config-url” , this is the exact syssync reference link that you need 🙂 clean and easy & without any hassle or unicode stuff…

7. Enjoy distributing this , you can use outlook.exe /share stssync://url , or use a Link in a webpage to make the users add the lists to their outlook.

That’s it 🙂

Remove “Zombi” reminders using MFCMAPI

I was requested to do this the other day.. so I use the amazing MFCMAPI tool which opens wide mailboxes and thier raw content..

Be aware that i am  really deleting an appointment ! the reminder will be gone with it. (Thanks for Steve for correcting me here.)

to do so we have a few steps:

1. Launch MFCMAPI tool on the user’s client.

2. Go to Session -> Logon and Display Store Table

3. Select the outlook profile of the user and double-click “Mailbox – your user name”

4. Expand “Root Container”

5. Expand “Top of Information Store”

6. Now its the tricky part , we need to find the specific reminder that does the troubles, there might be a few directory’s of reminders (maybe in more then one language…).

7. Double click the folder & start looking for the specific reminder (really the appointment)..

8. When you find the appointment or a few together even , right click and choose “Delete Message” , in the options select “permanent deletion (deletes to deleted item retention if supported)”.

9. close MFCMAPI & re-check in outlook.

you can use this method to delete problematic appointments, messages & all other MAPI data inside your exchange mailbox. BUT ! be careful , you can mess your mailbox up if you do something wrong …

Reference for steps and example …

Download MFCMAPI Latest version:

http://www.codeplex.com/MFCMAPI

http://exchangeshare.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/delete-corrupted-hidden-or-stale-rules-from-mailbox-with-mfcmapi/

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924297