Alexander’s Blog

You can download the Remove Hidden Data Add-in that removes the metadata from Office files. With this add-in you can permanently remove hidden data and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint files.

You can run the Remove Hidden Data add-in on individual files from within your Office XP or Office 2003 application. Or, you can run Remove Hidden Data on multiple files at once from the command line. In either case, to run the tool you must have the application installed in which the document was created.

The Offrhdreadme.htm file included with the add-in includes a complete list of all of the types of data that the tool will help to remove. By default, you can locate this file in the \Program Files\Microsoft Office\Remove Hidden Data Tool\1033 directory in the drive where you installed the tool. If you installed the tool to a different directory, you can locate this file in the \1033 directory, a subdirectory of the add-in installation folder.

Important things to know:

- You should run the Remove Hidden Data add-in on files when you are ready to publish them. This is because some of the data that the tool removes is used by Office for collaboration features, such as Track Changes, Comments, and Send for Review.

- You should always save to a new file name, rather than overwrite the original file with the new document, in order to preserve a copy of the document containing the original data.

- The Remove Hidden Data add-in does not work with Information Rights Management-protected or digitally-signed files.

NOTE: This add-in is not compatible with the 2007 Office system. The Document Inspector feature in the 2007 Office system replaces this add-in. For more information see the Office 2007 Resource Kit content and the online Help topic.

You can download the tool here.

When I want to send myself reminders, sometimes I use Outlook 2007 or Outlook Web Access - OWA (but you can use any e-mail client) to send a Short Message Service (SMS) text message to my cell phone. For example, when I travel on Southwest and want to print my boarding pass. I send a text message with flight time and ticket confirmation number. If I am not in the office, I call a friend with my confirmation number and have them print out my boarding pass for me.

I do the same when I need to send SMS text messages to my friends because if I am in front of a computer, it is much easier to use Outlook to type a text message then to use my cell phone. Keep in mind that you are still limited to a total of 160 characters in the message subject plus the body and that even if you compose your message in HTML format, the carrier will send the message in plain ASCII text.

To send an SMS text message, simply compose the message in Outlook and then address it to the sender in the following format:

phone_number@carrier_domain

For example, if Bill Gates’ phone number is 425-555-1234 and he uses SprintPCs, you will send a message to:

4255551234@messaging.sprintpcs.com

Here are some of the common carriers.

Cingular: phonenumber@cingularme.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
VoiceStream: phonenumber@voicestream.net

If for some reason you don’t want to use your Exchange account to send out SMS text messages in Outlook, you can add your POP3 account at Gmail, Yahoo, etc. and then use that account to send out text messages. Of course, you can do the reverse, send out messages from cell phone to your Outlook but most people who have SMS messaging available on their cell phone already know that. Sending out messages from Outlook to the cell phone is a relatively lesser-known fact.

Microsoft offers a Microsoft Outlook SMS Add-in for Outlook 2003/2007 that is supported on Windows 2003/XP/Vista. Of course, Microsoft is not going to create a piece of software and not have an acronym, that would be too un-cool. Therefore, Microsoft calls this add-in MOSA. You can download and read all about MOSA and its features here.

Adobe’s Acrobat Professional along with pretty much every piece of software that Adobe makes is criticized for it’s lack of user-friendliness and intuitiveness. If you are trying to edit a PDF document in Adobe Acrobat Professional by using the TouchUp Text Tool, you may have encountered an error when you try to edit or delete the text. The error you get is:

All or part of the selection has no available font system. You cannot add or delete text using the currently selected fonts.

Frankly, in this case the error is useful as it gives you some hint as to what the problem might be. The problem here is that the font used in the PDF document that you are trying to edit is not one of the system fonts. In order to fix the problem, you need to use a font that is recognized by the system.

Highlight the text you are trying to delete or edit and then right-click and select Properties. Click on the Text tab. You will notice that on the Text tab the Permissions section says “No system font available.” Change the font to a system font. For example, if the text used is Myriad-Roman, from the Font drop-down button change it to MyriadPro-Regular. You will notice the Permissions section now says “Can embed font.” Once you close the Properties window, you sould be able to delete or edit the text as necessary.

Crawling is the process in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 by which the system parses the content and its metadata to build a content index. The content index (a.k.a. index) is then used to serve search queries. In MOSS 2007 you can either perform a full or an incremental crawl. In most environments, an administrator will schedule the crawls so they take place automatically. However, in certain situations you may need to perform a manual crawl. For example, if you apply a crawl rule to the content you would want to run a manual crawl. Keep in mind that a full crawl is more taxing on the CPU and memory than an incremental crawl. Another thing to understand is that once you start a crawl, you may not want to stop it. In other words, it may be advisable to let the system finish the crawl or if you must, simply pause it.

WARNING: Consider the pros and cons of stopping versus pausing a crawl. When you stop a crawl of a content source, MOSS 2007 automatically performs a full crawl the next time you crawl that content source. This is true even in situations where you perform an incremental crawl and then stop it. For this reason, depending on your situation, it may be advisable to consider pausing the crawl rather than stopping it.

To start a full or incremental crawl manually, start SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration console.

1.  In the Quick Launch area, under Shared Services Administration, click on a shared service.

2. On the Shared Services Administration page click Search administration in the Search section.

3. On the Search Administration page, in the Quick Launch area, Click Content sources in the Crawling section.

You may not see Search administration listed in that section if you do not have the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers installed. In that case click Search settings in the Search section in step 2 and then perform step 3.

4. On the Configure Search Settings page, click Content sources and crawl schedules, which is the first link on that page in the Crawl Settings section.

5. On the Manage Content Sources page, move your mouse cursor over the content source that you want to crawl.

6. Click on the drop-down arrow next to the content source and then either click Start Full Crawl or click Start Incremental Crawl.

You may have encountered a situation where you’ve created a Distribution List in Exchange Server 2007 and the members of the Distribution List are not receiving the messages. The postmaster account gets the following delivery error:

Delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists:
DL_name@company.com
Your message wasn’t delivered because of security policies. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.

At the beginning of the detailed diagnostic message it states “#550 5.7.1 RESOLVER.RST.AuthRequired; authentication required ##.”

Here’s what may be the cause of the problem. By default, when you create a Distribution List, the delivery is restricted to users that are authenticated. When you use the Distribution List inside your organization it works fine because the users are authenticate but users outside your organization may not be able to communicate with the Distribution List members.

Here’s what you can do to fix the problem.
1.    Go to the Distribution List’s Properties.
2.    Click on the Mail Flow Settings tab.
3.    Double-click Message Delivery Restrictions.
4.    Uncheck the box “Require that all senders are authenticated.”

There is no need to restart the computer or any of the services.