June 30, 2009

Status update on issue with Outlook 2007 Service Pack 2

Filed under: Alerts,Miscellaneous — Tags: , , , , — gieseno @ 15:32

We have received a status update on the SP2 issue today: The request has now been officially accepted by the Outlook Product Group and we’re told a developer is actively working on implementing the actual code changes. Our request is currently scheduled to be included in the next bi-monthly Cumulative Update for Microsoft Office which is due end of August. The June update is already due later today (unfortunate timing). Note that there is no guarantee yet that a fix will become available at all.

We will keep you updated on any new developments.

June 26, 2009

Issue with Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Outlook 2007 confirmed

Filed under: Alerts,Miscellaneous — Tags: , , , , — gieseno @ 16:20

On Monday Microsoft Product Support Services confirmed to us that the issue mentioned in our previous blog entry is indeed an error that was introduced in the “February Cumulative Update (CU) / Service Pack 2″. The problem has been identified and is now being worked on but at the time of this writing there is no solution yet. We will update this blog accordingly as new information becomes available.

The symptoms of the issue are:

  • When sending a new message on behalf of a shared mailbox account where you have full “Send as” privileges (as opposed to “Send on behalf” or “Delegate” rights), the message stored in the Sent Items folder will appear as if sent with “Send on behalf” rights, i.e. the sender will appear as “User on behalf of Account” rather than just “Account”.
  • When replying to a message in a shared mailbox, after the message has been sent, Outlook completely resets the sender information to the current user so that messages stored in the Sent Items folder no longer contain any information about the sender that appeared at the recipient, i.e. the sender will be shown only as “User” rather than “Account”.

Note again that this only affects the local copies of your sent messages. The recipients of your messages will always see the intended sender.

Note that this issue is independent of Lucatec® Mask and can unfortunately also not be fixed or worked around in an acceptable way from within the addin. This will have to be resolved by the Office team themselves.

June 24, 2009

Lucatec® MASK 2.3.2 released!

Filed under: Lucatec MASK,Releases — Tags: , , , , — gieseno @ 11:02

Minor service release containing a couple of improvements to stability and behavioural consistency as well as minor compatibility fixes for the latest Office updates.

What’s new…

May 19, 2009

Issue with Service Pack 2 for Office 2007

Filed under: Alerts — Tags: , , , , — gieseno @ 15:16

[Update (2009-08-26): A hotfix package for the issue discussed in this article is now available from Microsoft. Please see this blog entry for details.]

Earlier today we have identified an issue with Lucatec® Mask that is apparently caused directly by changes in the latest Service Pack for Microsoft Office System 2007. The symptoms of this issue are that replies and forwards are no longer moved to the intended target folder after sending, i.e. they remain in the primary user’s Sent Items folder. Furthermore when looking at those items in that folder the sender will be shown as “[Current User] on behalf of [Intended Sender]” or even just “[Current User]” even if the “Send as” permissions have been correctly set up on the Exchange Server. According to our tests however it seems the sender information is only changed after the message has already been sent, so recipients will not notice any change.

We strongly recommend users of Lucatec® Mask to postpone installation of Service Pack 2 until a fix has been devised. See below for a partial workaround.

Resolving this issue is currently our top priority. We will update this article as new information becomes available.

This issue affects all versions of Lucatec® Mask since at least version 2.0.1 (released January 2007).

Update (2009-05-19): We have now implemented a workaround for the issue of items not being moved. Note that this does not fix the issue of inaccurate sender names in stored sent items. We are still researching how best to address this.

You can download a pre-release build of the upcoming next Service Release containing the fix (amongst others) from this link:
Lucatec® Mask 2.3.1 Code name “Cadillac” (Build 435)
(please see the release notes document included with the download for further details on changes in this release)

Update: (2009-05-26): We have now opened a support case with Microsoft about the changing sender information as we have also been able to reproduce this in environments that do not have Lucatec® Mask installed at all. We will post updates on the case to this blog as they become available.

Furthermore, this issue can occur in seemingly erratic patterns, i.e. some users might never notice this at all while for others it can happen for almost every single message they send on behalf of another account.

(Last updated 2009-08-27 10:50 CEST)

Kind regards,

Oliver Giesen
Chief Software Developer

April 9, 2009

Lucatec® MASK 2.3.0 released!

Filed under: Lucatec MASK,Releases — Tags: , , , , — gieseno @ 22:35

We are happy to inform you that we have released version 2.3.0 of Lucatec® Mask. This is a major technology release with significant changes to the way the addin works “under the hood” as well as major updates to our development stack. It also adds a couple of minor new features, such as improvements to the installer and improved handling of multi-user environments like Citrix or Terminal Server.

New Options dialog in Lucatec MASK 2.3.0

The most visible change however is a redesigned configuration interface. As the regular tab on Outlook’s Options dialog was already getting a little crowded and as we are fully intending to add more features in the future we decided to move the options to their own sub-dialog that could more easily be adjusted to additional configuration options.

Oh yes, and Lucatec® Mask 2.3.0 has been fully tested under Microsoft® Windows 7 Beta 1! ;)

Please refer to the Release Notes for a more detailed list of changes.

To install the update,  just download the installer from our Download page, login as Administrator and run the setup program. You do not need to uninstall the previous version. Please make sure that Outlook is not running while you install the update.

Besides the new release we have also begun adding new content to the Lucatec® Mask product pages. There is now a Feature Matrix available, allowing you to easily compare changes between different versions of Lucatec® Mask. We have also set up a Blog which should allow us to publish new information, tutorials, best-practices, etc. in a more ad-hoc fashion than the existing pages allowed. This will also eventually replace our old News page.

Kind regards,

Oliver Giesen
Chief Software Developer

January 30, 2009

Lucatec® MASK 2.2.3 released!

Filed under: Lucatec MASK,Releases — Tags: , , , — gieseno @ 17:35

Minor service release containing a couple of third-party updates and stability fixes.

What’s new…

December 3, 2008

Lucatec® MASK 2.2.2 released!

Filed under: Lucatec MASK,Releases — Tags: , , — gieseno @ 16:27

Minor service release containing a couple of third-party updates and bug fixes.

What’s new…

August 29, 2008

Lucatec® MASK 2.2.1 released!

Filed under: Lucatec MASK,Releases — Tags: , , , — gieseno @ 13:48

We are happy to inform you that we have released version 2.2.1 of our Outlook Team Tool, Lucatec® Mask. This is mainly a service release fixing a number of rarely encountered issues.

Furthermore, it is now possible to add an additional column to your folder views to display the name of the person who actually sent a message (rather than the account that it was sent on behalf of). In order to start recording and displaying this information bring up any folder’s Properties dialog and look out for the button labelled “Add Sender Column” on the Lucatec® Mask tab.

Please refer to the Release Notes for a more detailed list of changes and possible upgrade issues.

To install the update, just download the installer from our Download page, login as Administrator and run the setup program. You do not need to uninstall the previous version. Please make sure that Outlook is not running while you install the update.

Kind regards,

Oliver Giesen,
Chief Software Developer

December 14, 2007

Lucatec® MASK 2.2.0 released!

Filed under: Lucatec MASK,Releases — Tags: , , , , , , — gieseno @ 17:30

We are happy to inform you that we have released version 2.2.0 of our Outlook Team Tool, Lucatec® Mask. This is mainly a compatibility release finally adding support for Outlook 2007, Windows Vista and WordMail (i.e. the option to use Word to edit e-mail messages in Outlook 2003 and earlier). As a side-effect of the changes it is now also possible to use embedded images in signatures. Furthermore there have been lots of subtle improvements all over.

Please refer to the Release Notes for a more detailed list of changes and possible upgrade issues.

To install the update, just download the installer from our Download page, login as Administrator and run the setup program. You do not need to uninstall the previous version. Please make sure that Outlook is not running while you install the update.

Kind regards and happy holidays!

Oliver Giesen
Chief Software Developer

November 23, 2007

Lucatec® MASK 2.2.0 Beta available!

Filed under: Lucatec MASK,Releases — Tags: , , , — gieseno @ 17:23

There is now a preview release available for interested testers with full support for Outlook 2007 and Windows Vista.

Sign up now…

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