Archives

Archives / 2006 / November
  • Mounting ISO Images with Vista

    After installing Vista this weekend I started searching for a good tool for mounting ISO images. This is actually one of the few head-scratching moment I've had with Vista so far - why didn't they bake this in?

    I tried several that either didn't install, didn't work, or were in some way flaky. Finally I found a post from Arian Kulp on Virtual CloneDrive from Elby.

    Virtual CloneDrive is a free utility to mount ISO images on Windows (including Vista). One thing I really liked was that it associates itself with the ISO images so you can simply right-click on a .ISO file and mount it directly.

  • Office 2007 Product Key Problems

    Seems there is a bit of an issue with the MSDN Product Keys for Office 2007.

    Several of the Office products share the same Product Key issued by MSDN; "Office 2007 Desktop Programs" is used for Groove. InfoPath, and OneNote and both Project and Visio share another one.

    When I went to activate the assorted application on my workstation it failed for InfoPath, OneNote, and Project (Groove and Visio activated without a hitch). After some looking around I was able to find a thread in the managed MSDN newsgroups on this topic. Looks like several users have reported this problem.

    My guess is that the licensing servers are unable to recognize which product is being activated and it assumes that you are trying to re-activate the same product again and again. They also don't seem to know these are MSDN keys that should be allowed several installations (see MSDN Licensing FAQ)

    I was able to get OneNote activated over the phone (it was the only application I needed ASAP) after I explained the problem. Of course your mileage may vary.

    Update: This seems to have been fixed. Also, I've turned comments off due to people using the comments to request and publish product keys. Go pirate somewhere else guys.

  • Outlook 2007 Doesn't Work with Exchange 5.5

    Not that I'm really very surprised but Outlook 2007 will not connect to Exchange 5.5. I found a note about this on the TechNet Forums:

    "Microsoft continuously strives to provide a consistent and predictable end-of-life-cycle experience for all of its products.  In accordance with standard Microsoft life-cycle policies Exchange 5.5 ended extended life-cycle support on January 10, 2006.  As a result, Outlook 2007 will not support Exchange 5.5.  Because neither the Outlook or Exchange team is supporting this combination we will not discover and/or fix issues that crop up as the result of innovations in both products .  Rather than subjecting customers to potential serious issues like data loss or frequent server downtime we choose to prevent Outlook from connecting to these older and now unsupported servers.  Our research has shown that there is a relatively small set of customers who want to upgrade their desktops to the latest and greatest versions of Office and run server technology as old as Exchange 5.5.  There are clearly exceptions but they don't seem to be the norm."

    Something to keep in mind if, like me, you need to connect to an Exchange 5.5 email server.