• Office 2003 bug locks you out of your documents

    Posted on December 14, 2009 at 18:26 CST by • Comment in the Forums

    Remember Windows Rights Management Services, the Windows Server-based piece of %$#@! that companies use to lock up their documents, so you can’t get at certain documents on a server? The Wikipedia listing for WRMS describes it thusly:

    Specific operations like printing, copying, editing, forwarding, and deleting can be allowed or disallowed by content authors for individual pieces of content, and RMS administrators can deploy RMS templates that group these rights together into predefined rights that can be applied en masse.

    I railed against WRMS in my books and several articles, many years ago.

    Guess what? If your company uses RMS, and it uses Office 2003, starting on December 11, you may not be able to open, print, copy, edit, forward, delete or otherwise use those RMS-protected files. If you try to open a document with Word, Excel or PowerPoint 2003, or you try to open an RMS-protected message in Outlook 2003. you’re completely outta luck. You get the message “Unexpected error occurred. Please try again later or contact your system administrator.”

    Yeah, right.

    What happened? David Worthington at Technologizer says that Microsoft let an Information Rights Management certificate expire.

    I won’t start ranting again. Suffice it to say that if your company was suckered into trusting Microsoft’s digital rights management software, they got what they deserved. You have my permission to yell LOUDLY at the idiot who decided to install it in the first place, and to continue SCREAMING until somebody who controls your server listens to reason. Windows RMS is a disaster waiting to happen. Oh. Wait a sec. It already has happened.

    UPDATE: A hotfix has been announced, at least for Word and Excel. I’ve seen very few details, except you have to call Microsoft to get the hotfix, and you have to be running Office 2003 Service Pack 3.

    Office Patches/Security ,
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