Trusting Outlook Add-ins
Microsoft Outlook has some security built in to help prevent external applications from accessing its internal data. This data consists of your contacts, email addresses on emails, and others. This is meant to help prevent a virus from harvesting information to then spread itself to other potential victims. Where does leave the legit companies that provide extensions to Outlook?
There are a few different tricks that can be performed on the Microsoft Outlook client computer than can attempt to circumvent the security warnings that the user sees. These techniques have their limit, however, when the client is connected to Exchange Server.
If the client is connected to Exchange Server and they are getting security prompts from an installed add-in, the only solution is to trust the add-in from Exchange. There is a great write up about this at SlipStick. SlipStick has a lot of information regarding Outlook and Exchange. If you are experiencing the security prompts in this environment, check out the SlipStick site.
Sperry Buttons Don’t Appear in Word Editor
Have you installed one of Sperry Software add-ins but all of the buttons do not appear correctly? You can see the "Sperry Software Add-ins" button, but the "Send Individually" or "BCC ON" buttons do not appear when you create a new mail message. I will attempt to provide the reason for this and a solution.
Most of the Sperry Software Outlook add-ins also have a Microsoft Word add-in included with them behind the scenes. This is necessary when the user is using Microsoft Word as their email editor. This option is set by clicking Tools…Options…Mail Format. A Word add-in is required to provide the Outlook add-in functionality because the Outlook add-in is unable to control Word on its own.
Changing the mail editor to "Not" use word will usually result in the buttons now appearing. That is not a very good solution because we do not want to block people from using Word as their editor. Fortunately, there is a solution.
Follow these steps:
- Close Word and Outlook down.
- Open Task Manager by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del.
- Select "Task Manager"
- Click the "Processes" Tab.
- If OUTLOOK.EXE or WINWORD.EXE are running, end the process.
- Download the Uninstall Toolbar Tool from http://www.SperrySoftware.com/Outlook/Tools.asp
- Run the Uninstall Toolbar Tool.
- Restart Outlook and create a new mail message.
- The buttons should now be appearing.
We believe that the issue is caused by Word running while the user installs the add-ins. This situation does not allow the toolbar to be added to the Word Documents. Uninstalling the Toolbars forces Word to create the toolbar the next time it is started.
Distribution List Limitations and Workarounds
Distribution Lists were created to make it simple to send email to a group of people without having to search through the contacts folder to add each contact. Although this adds a convenience factor to sending mass email, it has some limitations. I will describe these limitations and provide some workarounds.
Limitation # 1
Distribution Lists have a size limitation. This is the biggest gripe I hear regarding distribution lists. A distribution list is not limited by the number of email addresses contained in it, but by a byte size factor. This technical detail makes it difficult to determine how many contacts can be added to each list. If the email addresses are shorter, then you may get one or more then a list with long emails. Most users should find that their list will max out at around 120 entries. The good news (if you can call it good) is that this can be overcome. I will discuss the solution after the second limitation.
Limitation # 2
By default, a distribution list does not contain all the same data that a contact card would have. This causes limitations on the fields that you can pull from a distribution list. Using the Send Individually add-in as an example, it is not possible to substitute by anything other than Full Name with a distribution list. This limitation is due to a distribution list not containing a property for the name’s individual parts like a contact file does. You may also see this type of limitation with doing a mail merge with a distribution list.
Solution #1 (Fixes Limitation #1)
I mentioned that the distribution list is not limited by the number of email addresses, but by the byte size of the distribution list. This works in our favor because it allows us to do list nesting. What I mean by list nesting is that you can add multiple distribution lists to another distribution list, just like you would contacts to a distribution list. This creates a list of lists. The master list would then be limited to approximately 120 distribution lists. This situation grows exponentially but provides a way to create a large distribution list, made up of smaller distribution lists.
Solution #2 (Fixes Limitation #1 and Limitation #2)
A feature that is greatly overlooked within Outlook is the categories. Categories provide a lot of functionality for organizing email related items. You can even sort your contacts by category. So now, you can assign a category (or multiple categories) to each contact. The category could be your pseudo distribution list. When you want to send an email to that category of contacts you would follow the below steps:
- In the Navigation Pane, select "Contacts"
- Change your view to sort "By Category"
- Select the Category that you want to send an email to. (you do not need to select the contacts, just the category header)
- In the main menu, select Actions…Create…New Message to Contact
- Click Ok
- You will see the names added to the "TO:" field of the email. Complete the email as you normally would and send it.
Not only does this solve the size limitation, but in the example above with Send Individually, you can now select the contacts to send to and gain full Substitution capabilities. This is because you are using actual contacts and not a distribution list. This opens up substitution to items like First and Last name, making the email more personable.
New Online Sales Chat
On Friday, Sperry Software added a new feature to our website. Visitors will notice that on all of the add-in pages, there is a new chat logo. This functionality is provided by Live Person and provides visitors the ability to ask a quick question without the need to pick up a phone. I believe that this will be a great benefit for customers looking for a trial version or an answer to a quick question. The sales staff is trained to answer your questions about our products. I understand that the information pages may not answer all questions and personally feel that this complements our other means of service. I am constantly looking at ways to improve our customer’s experience with Sperry Software. Look for more new features coming in the future.We request that technical support questions still go through email or the community forums at http://www.sperrysoftware.com/Community. The chat service is reserved for pre-sales questions at this time.
512 Error Fixed in Send Individually
Today, the development team has updated a display error that was occurring in Send Individually. It was apparent that when the add-in was loaded that some users would see an error at the bottom of the configuration window regarding "Error 512". Although this was just a display issue and did not effect functionality of the product, it was confusing customers. We apologize for the message appearing in the first place. The issue has been resolved in version 2.0.16. If you have purchased within the last 2 years and want to upgrade, you can do so by using the original link you received when you purchased. This is not a required upgrade.
Outlook 2007 Hyperlink Security Warning
Microsoft made a lot of improvements when they released Office 2007. A lot of those improvements deal with security to protect the user. With a lot of phishing scams and other attacks that are carried out through email, this is a really nice enhancement. Unfortunately, for power users, some of these enhancements hinder the functionality they are looking for. One of these features is the new Hyperlink Security Warning. This feature will display a warning box every time the user clicks on a hyperlink that points to a file on the local file system. It requires the user to allow or deny the action. I would agree that in general this is a good feature to have because it is not common practice to receive emails that have hyperlinks to local files. For some users of our Attachment Save program, we have found that the warning only inhibits the add-in. The add-in saves the attachments in email to the local hard drive and replaces them with a hyperlink. With the new warning message, every time a user wants to reference the file from the email they are prompted with a request for confirmation.
Fortunately, there is a workaround for this situation. I must warn you that making the changes I will reference will create a security risk and is only recommended for users that understand what they are doing. You can find the workaround in this KB Article. The solution requires modifying the registry by adding a new security key named DisableHyperLinkWarning and setting the value to 1. Be careful changing this value as it will disable all hyperlink warnings in all of your Office 2007 programs.
Date Display Format Tricks
Time Date Signature, Insert Date Time, and Quick Text Hotkeys all allow you to specify a date/time format. The add-in provides a drop down list that allows you to select a pre-defined date format. What most people don’t realize is that they can type directly in that box to specify a custom format. I get a lot of people asking how they can get the format to display in a specific way. I hope that the information provided here will help answer your questions.Here is a list of formats that can be used:
- d - day of the month, no leading zero (1-30 (or 31))
- dd - day of month, with leading zero (01-30 (or 31))
- ddd - day of the week, short form (like Mon, Tue, Wed)
- dddd - day of the week, long form (like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday)
- w - week of the year, no leading zero (1-51)
- ww - week of the year, with leading zero (01-51)
- m - month, no leading zero (1-12)
- mm - month, with leading zero (01-12)
- mmm - full month name, short (like Oct, Nov, Dec)
- mmmm - full month name, long (like October, November, December)
- y - day of the year
- yy - two digit year
- yyyy - four digit year
- h - hours
- hh - hours with leading zero
- n - minutes
- nn - minutes with leading zero
- s - seconds
- ss - seconds with leading zero
- AMPM - Appends “AM” or “PM” to the time; if this is left off, you get military time
Here are a few examples of how to use these formats for December 1, 2008 at 1:05 PM:
- m/d/yy -> 12/1/08
- h:nn AMPM -> 1:05 PM
- dddd, mmmm d, yyyy -> Thursday, December 1, 2008
- h:nn -> 13:05
This trick really comes in handy for our European customers trying to get the time and date in a format they are used to. This allows great flexibility to the formats for use and provides a way to display the information in just about any way you can think of.
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