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Four KBs to address problems epidemic, ubiquitous and replete



 
 
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Old August 19th, 2004, 03:51 AM
Rick
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default Four KBs to address problems epidemic, ubiquitous and replete

I see no intent of spam from your post and I guess Milly is just being a
little over-sensitive. I agree with you that there are lots of posts asking
about the same problem over and over again from various office users. They
may or may not had read the KBs for their specific problems depending on
their level of knowledge.

Another obvious reason for these repeat postings are that there are no
replys to them and they know of no other sources to ask their questions. If
only the MVPs or any experienced users are willing to reply, and not
presuming that the poster should do a search or read the KB first before
posting which I do believe that most posters had already done their search
for answers but to no avail, if they are able to find an immediate solutions
from their search, they would not have posted in this Newsgroup waiting for
that someone to help & reply which at the mean time is mostly not happening.

This is my personal opinion and I don't mean to offend, but if I did, I
apologise beforehand

"Gregg Hill" wrote:

If you had only posted in the suggested group, I would have missed it. I
found this thread during a Google Groups search, and viola, there's the
answer!

THANK YOU!


"Chad Harris" wrote in message
...
Milly-- ) (are there a lot of
people thinking seriously about this?) The problem of getting Office
apps' SP1 updates in are showing up on all these groups, and most are
shoowing up on mpo.update statistically but they are prominent and
ubiquitous on the rest.

The intent is to see the posts go down, that means that people aren't

having
the problems that anyone reasonable at any level knows they should not be
having. They should be spending their time on enjoying Office, One Note,
and Outlook and moving their learning curve from the dictum that 95% of
Office users can only use 3% of its features. MSFT is a great company,

but
it's products have to be more intuitive and that is hardly to be equated
with dumb downed. When SP launched I saw a lot of MSFT meetings where the
presenter started saying to groups something like "We don't want you to

have
to worry your little heads about What's Behind the Gui"--not at Technet,

TS2
or MSDN, but to IT Pros at professional firms who just laughed.

Sadly, because of pressure borne by ignorance, Smart Tags were whacked out
of XP RTM during its last Beta because people believed Redmond was using
them to spy--faster than Tony Soprano would take out a troublesome
storekeeper on his trash route.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-269167.html?legacy=cnet


*There was no intent to spam, nor was there a spam result.* KBs ain't no
spam when this many peoples be having moocho trouble getting a hotfix in.

I *know a bell shaped curve of Enterprise decision makers would not be

happy
that their Sys Ads or IT staff has to resort to interpreting verbose logs

or
parsing product code GUIDs or download subkeys or hacking the registry in
serial fashion* so that Suzy the Administrative Assistance or the back
office personnel can use Office to get out documents or put something on

an
Outlook calendar or meeting schedule. Nor should they have to, but that's
the way things are in Redmonville, North Carolina and Dallas Texasvill

rhatt
now.

Spam is when some bozo or bozoess posts something entirely off topic to
helping with these particular software and hardware problems and those are
ususally promptly removed. If you think MSKBs on this topic on these

groups
that were carefully selected are spam, petition the boys and girls at
Redmond and Dallas campuses who monitor these groups to remove those KBs

you
don't think are relevant there.

So if it's spam, Milly why am I seeing so many posts on the other 3 groups
that I hit that are headed "Can't install Office 2003 update." Sometimes
it's can't install Outlook SP1 or One Note SP1 and although there are a

few
reasons for each, many have the same common demonimator as the Office 2003
SP1 problem and sometimes Office 2K or Office XP install problems outlined
above.

There's another point. Time. Some people who read the Outlook group for
info, don't take or have time to read Office.misc, Offic.setup,
office.update but experience the problem.

Another is that you know what a KB is, and since you have so many ways to
keep up with them at your fingertips, just don't click a topic as

irrelevant
and spammy as "Four New KBs issued on Updating Office 2003 SP1--although I
think the volume of people I run into and see on the web having the

problems
is truly epidemic and pandemic and MSFT ought to address it with the MSI
beyond Windows ® Installer. V 3.00.3790.2180 in XP SP2 RTM and Office
.net/Longhorn/Version 12 that's percolating right now at Redmond, Dallas,
and North Carolina, maybe Bangalore.

Just take a good look. There are general Office SP1 questions on each

group
that I hit. They all should be directed to office.setup or office.update.
*but they aren't.* They are on all these Office related groups--just

look
at the posts. And Milly is right there in case Ms. Perpicia Tick doesn't
hit it to tell them where to take their post.

There was no intent to spam and it wasn't spam. If you think it's spam,
explain why there are about 500 posts with basically the same question

with
a differential diagnosis of a very few causes that Sloan tried to hit in

the
KBs just out.

The average Office user isn't going to read the KBs at all nor is their

help
disk, and unfortunately they don't know the existence of these groups, but
that's another issue. The average Windows user wouldn't know a KB from an
SUV unfortunately. Ask the next time your in a super market check out

line
or buying a dress. Ask how many of them are fluent in Hex or Hungarian
notation.
Sometimes just a little too much is assumed at Redmond.

I see this phenom a lot. People will duplicate post instead of cross

post,
and they will continue their threads erratically and sporadically on

diffent
groups at the same time for the same question. So one will have 5 posters
and one will have 10 posters trying to help with the exact same question
posted on different groups by the same poster at staggered intervals.

You're not speaking for everyone. It's not spam for some people. It

will
cut down on posts and frustration for more people if they read Sloan's

KBs.
I see a lot of posts on each group that I hit that should properly be
directed to One--OfficeUpdates, but they aren't. That's precisely why the
crosspost was done. To get the KBs to people on the groups who all have
multiple "I can't get my One Note, Outlook and Office SP1 in. And there

is
more diifficulty in getting this particular SP in for Office 2003 than

there
has been for years of Windows and Office service packs. Considerably

more.

Most people are not going to be able parse KBs, GUIDs, and verbose logs

just
to update Office nor should they have to. But that's apparently the way

it
is for reasons that are still not quite clear with all due respect to the
major etiologies as posted by MSFT. The average Office user on the planet
is not going to metabolize these Resource Kit tools well although a lot

of
us enjoy learning about them from people kind enough and skillful enough

to
teach us (like you, like Sloan, like the Outlook and Office experts and
others). Again just yell Office Resource Kit in your supermarket checkout
line and see if it gets the same response as "J-Lo's marrying again."

My point--all the people in your checkout line need and use Office and Mr.
Ballmer and Mr. Gates and Mr. Sinofsky darn well hope that continues. See
NY Times Article on Office at the bottom.

1) registry keys that are way too easily corrupted
2) Local install cache corruptions that MSFT can't fix after 11 versions

and
Office 12, Office Longhorn, Office Blackcomb, and Office .net or whatever

in
the oven.
3) There is a tool available from the Office Resource Kit web site that

will
fix that for you. The Local Installation Source Tool that provides the
ability to repair the Local Installation Source is available for download
from

http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/...rn/LISTool.htm.
In addition of repairing the LIS, it will also provide the ability to

move
it to another
disk drive.

2. You are seeing the following message""This patch package could not be
opened. Verify that the patch package
exists and that you can access it, or contact the application vendor to
verify that this is a valid Windows Installer patch package."
or some other patch specific issue.

Try using the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility detailed here to uninstall
Office:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;290301

When you reinstall don't forget to not delete the local cache files at the
end of the installation so you will have your Local Install Source intact
and will be able to patch your Office installation without the possible

need
of the CD.

This article is speaking to concerns MSFT has about their cash cow Office
and most of these people aren't reading newsgroups, KBs, Technet Flash, or
any Office newsletters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/te.../16office.html

Ambitious Package to Raise Productivity (and Microsoft's Profit)
By STEVE LOHR

Published: August 16, 2004


EDMOND, Wash. - To most of the computer-using world, Microsoft Office is

the
familiar workhorse of the desktop, a collection of software for creating
documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

But for Microsoft, which is starting to see its growth slow as it ages,
reinventing that suite of old reliables - including Word, Excel and
PowerPoint - has become nothing less than a key to its future.

"Office defines business productivity," Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman,
told financial analysts in July. He added that "the productivity area is
probably the most important franchise that we have."

Advertisement


With that focus, Microsoft is now pursuing a strategy to transform Office
from a bundle of programs on personal computers into a family of software
that can put Microsoft's technology deeper into the operations of

corporate
data centers. As Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, wrote in

an
e-mail message to employees last month, "Our biggest growth opportunity is
with our existing base of Office users."

Microsoft is banking on the Office initiative to help it fend off the
challenge from open-source software and other competitors. But if the plan
stumbles, Microsoft's hopes for sustained growth and greater profits could
come under heavy pressure.

The logic of building on the Office franchise is not hard to see, given

that
it has more than 90 percent of the market for office software

applications.

The information worker business at Microsoft, which is nearly all from
Office, had revenues of $10.8 billion in the year ended in June, and
operating profit of more than $7.15 billion. As a stand-alone business,
Office - which on average sells for about $275 - would be slightly larger
than the second-largest software company, Oracle, and far more profitable.
Only the Windows operating system, the other pillar of Microsoft, is
slightly larger.

Traditional Office programs helped enhance productivity by allowing

workers
to easily create and modify digital documents. The aim of the new

initiative
is to increase the productivity with new tools for collaboration,
communications, planning and document handling.

New programs - like SharePoint, LiveMeeting, OneNote and InfoPath - have
been introduced in the last year or so as part of the "Office system," a
term Microsoft adopted last fall to replace "Office suite."

The new design makes programs like Word, Excel and Outlook e-mail part of
collaborative work spaces. In theory, a worker working in Word could tap
into all the corporate information on a customer or project.

"Making collaboration faster, easier and more efficient will be the next
revolution in worker productivity, and we want to be in the forefront,"

said
Peter Rinearson, vice president for new business development in

Microsoft's
information worker group. "The goal is to make Office a tool that steadily
delivers productivity improvements. It becomes a competitive advantage for
the companies that use it well. If you don't have it, you can't keep up."

Automating collaborative work, economists and analysts agree, is a

promising
frontier for productivity gains. The low-cost, networked communications of
the Internet make it a possibility. But there is a long way to go.

Analysts
estimate that 95 percent of today's workers use the telephone and e-mail

for
team projects. Microsoft has plenty of competition in the emerging market,
and Office's past success could prove an obstacle.

"Microsoft is trying to make Office less a product and more like an online
service," said Nate Root, an analyst for Forrester Research. "Adoption is
going to be slow because Microsoft is trying to change the paradigm. It's

a
fundamental cultural change in how people think of and use Office."

Yet across the Microsoft corporate campus, there is only optimism.

Anoop Gupta, a former Stanford University professor and a vice president

of
Microsoft's real-time collaboration group, points to Microsoft's own
experience with Web conferencing as proof of the new efficiencies. The
company's use of LiveMeeting, a Microsoft conferencing program, has
increased to 40,000 hours a week from 2,000 hours a week a year ago. Mr.
Gupta says that one of every five face-to-face meetings can be replaced

with
Web conferencing tools, and Microsoft estimates that it will save $70
million in reduced travel this year.



Continued
1 | 2 | Next


Best,

Chad Harris
____________________________________________

"Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]"


wrote in message ...
While we know that you mean well, please do not spam the news groups. A
simple posting to m.p.o.misc would have been sufficient.



__________________________________________________ ______________________

--
Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]

Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact. Due to
the (insert latest virus name here) virus, all mail sent to my personal
account will be deleted without reading.

After searching google.groups.com and finding no answer, Chad Harris

asked:

| *Recent KBs that May Help with the Epidemic or Pandemic of Office 2003
| Installation Problems*
|
|
| You cannot update your Office 2003 program to Service Pack 1 (August
| 17, 2004)
| http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;EN-US;884298
|
| Description of numbering scheme for product code GUIDs in Office 2003
| (August 17, 2004)
| http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=832672
|
| Frequently asked questions about the local install source feature in
| Office 2003(August 17, 2004)
| http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=830168
|
| How to troubleshoot an update installation by using log files in
| Office 2003 (August 13, 2004)
| http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=884290
|
| hth,
|
| Chad Harris






  #2  
Old August 19th, 2004, 05:14 AM
Chad Harris
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

Rick--

I appreicate your post. I think Milly is consistently over-sensitive when
she knows this software so admirably well. If someone posts about an XP
issue in an Office group, it isn't because they intend to go to the wrong
place, or spam for money which is the common demoninator of most spammers,
or just flail about for the first group they can click on with a blindfold,
it's because the issue may be sufficiently confusing *to them* that they
aren't sure if it's an Office or an OS issue. Sometimes, rarely, they don't
think about where they are posting, or it is brand new to them as it was to
Milly once upon a time, and there are times when even people experienced
with this software since Win 1.0 or 3.0 or Office 1.0 aren't always sure.

I also believe if a post is labeled *4 New KBs to Address MOS 03 SP1 install
problems*, and those problems are multiplying exponentially, that the reader
has the option not to click their mouse or keyboard combo either because
they already know the info or they don't feel they need or want to. The
bell shaped curve of people who could can't install Office 03 SP1 and hasn't
read those KBs probably will need to or have someone who helps them read
them instead.

There may be a real compare and contrast master's thesis out there for
someone as to the qualities of Office.setup and Office.update groups, but
I'm not sure of all the nuances that contrast them.

I don't know how I'd assess this prodigious amount of install difficulty if
I were Sloan Crayton (MSFT) or Renete [MS] or Bob Cooley [MSFT] and had
their "inside-baseball insight as to why this happened, or someone who is
familiar with the Beta Testing of these service packs, and the special
problems that seem to require such intensive care with Resource Kit tools
and a gamut of MSKBs, particularly Office SP1 2003-- but I believe that
Microsoft just completed a beta testing program for their operating system
Windows XP that was for a service pack called SP2 that is currently
releasing. The Windows SP clearly has exponentially less install problems
at any time during its beta builds and certainly now that it's RTM.

The vast majority of problems with XP SP2 are not *installation problems*
either via the network download that was available on August 10, or
Automatic or Windows Update's much smaller download. *They are 3rd party
compatibility problems that don't have very much at all to do with MSFT
whatsoever; they have to do with a bell shpaed curve of 3rd party software
vendors who have chosen to address XP SP2 (Build 2180) by saying *nothing*
on their web sites and doing nothing.* They could have said 1) Here's an
patch or batch file to get through ports on the Windows Firewall 2) Our
product is perfectly compatible with SP2 3) We don't have a clue what to
tell you, but we'll get around to looking for compatibility sometime between
XP SP2 and the next Beta, Longhorn--maybe we can sell you a new version of
our 3rd party software on XP SP2 coat tails.

This seems to be the novel approach of Norton who has a patch delivered not
by a download on their site, but by a component called Live Update. The
only paradoxical catch is that Live Update breaks without the patch--that's
a real chicken-egg dilema.

In contrast, Office 2003's service pack, is a service pack for an
application that Bill Gates told financial analysts "defines Office
productivity" as quoted in Technology section of the NY Times on August
16--two days ago. Along these lines Steven A. Ballmer sent MSFT employees
an email last month that said "Our biggest growth opportunity is with our
existing base of Office users." The times article went on to state "The
information worker business at Microsoft, which is nearly all from Office,
had revenues of $10.8 billion in the year ended in June, and operating
profit of more than $7.15 billion. As a stand-alone business, Office - which
on average sells for about $275 - would be slightly larger than the
second-largest software company, Oracle, and far more profitable. Only the
Windows operating system, the other pillar of Microsoft, is slightly
larger."

The article goes on to quote a former Stanford University professor, Anoop
Gupta, who is VP of MSFT's Real Time Collaberation group that Office is
evolving into an online culture with a paradigm shift that is morphing it
into an online service with apps like Live Meeting and
conferencing/collaberation features in Share Point, One Note, and Infopath
along with the dimension that XML and DRM architecture brings.

If Mr. Ballmer is right, and the biggest growth opportunity is Office, why
did so many multi-faceted bright and talented people let this Service Pack
release when it so darned hard to install compared to Windows XP SP2. If
you can't install it, you can't use it--and that's when setup or update
obstacles become very important. Anyone who has dealt with a thorny
cascade of setup problems comes to learn this rapidly. These install
problems should have been overcome with considerably more success and less
special tools and KBs before they were made available--even if it took 3
more months.

As to your insightful comments about MSFT's presumption, I agree with that
vein. I understand that learning is rewarding, but I'm not sure that the
one-upsmanship that seemsto accompany the ability to interpret verbose
logs, parse GUIDs and reg subkeys, interpret hex messages, or Hungarian
notation the way Charles Simonyi and his colleagues do is something that
every Office user needs to aspire to.

http://www.edge.org/digerati/simonyi/

To me the meaning of WYSIWYG also includes being simple to install so that
you can concentrate on enjoying the features and productivity of this
software that would have cut my time doing papers for class and other
documents (visions of One Note) in college easily by 80% if not more. But
maybe MSKBs and the Office Resource kit are going to need to be within arms
reach of every secretary the way type eraser and a spelling dictionary were
in a different era when Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen were riding their bikes at
ages 13 and 15 to "C Cubed" to show the adults their programming errors
with the DEC computer, and how to fix them.

Best,

Chad Harris
________________________________________________

"Rick" wrote in message
...
I see no intent of spam from your post and I guess Milly is just being a
little over-sensitive. I agree with you that there are lots of posts asking
about the same problem over and over again from various office users. They
may or may not had read the KBs for their specific problems depending on
their level of knowledge.

Another obvious reason for these repeat postings are that there are no
replys to them and they know of no other sources to ask their questions. If
only the MVPs or any experienced users are willing to reply, and not
presuming that the poster should do a search or read the KB first before
posting which I do believe that most posters had already done their search
for answers but to no avail, if they are able to find an immediate solutions
from their search, they would not have posted in this Newsgroup waiting for
that someone to help & reply which at the mean time is mostly not happening.

This is my personal opinion and I don't mean to offend, but if I did, I
apologise beforehand

"Gregg Hill" wrote:

If you had only posted in the suggested group, I would have missed it. I
found this thread during a Google Groups search, and viola, there's the
answer!

THANK YOU!


"Chad Harris" wrote in message
...
Milly-- ) (are there a lot of
people thinking seriously about this?) The problem of getting Office
apps' SP1 updates in are showing up on all these groups, and most are
shoowing up on mpo.update statistically but they are prominent and
ubiquitous on the rest.

The intent is to see the posts go down, that means that people aren't

having
the problems that anyone reasonable at any level knows they should not
be
having. They should be spending their time on enjoying Office, One
Note,
and Outlook and moving their learning curve from the dictum that 95% of
Office users can only use 3% of its features. MSFT is a great company,

but
it's products have to be more intuitive and that is hardly to be equated
with dumb downed. When SP launched I saw a lot of MSFT meetings where
the
presenter started saying to groups something like "We don't want you to

have
to worry your little heads about What's Behind the Gui"--not at Technet,

TS2
or MSDN, but to IT Pros at professional firms who just laughed.

Sadly, because of pressure borne by ignorance, Smart Tags were whacked
out
of XP RTM during its last Beta because people believed Redmond was using
them to spy--faster than Tony Soprano would take out a troublesome
storekeeper on his trash route.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-269167.html?legacy=cnet


*There was no intent to spam, nor was there a spam result.* KBs ain't
no
spam when this many peoples be having moocho trouble getting a hotfix
in.

I *know a bell shaped curve of Enterprise decision makers would not be

happy
that their Sys Ads or IT staff has to resort to interpreting verbose
logs

or
parsing product code GUIDs or download subkeys or hacking the registry
in
serial fashion* so that Suzy the Administrative Assistance or the back
office personnel can use Office to get out documents or put something on

an
Outlook calendar or meeting schedule. Nor should they have to, but
that's
the way things are in Redmonville, North Carolina and Dallas Texasvill

rhatt
now.

Spam is when some bozo or bozoess posts something entirely off topic to
helping with these particular software and hardware problems and those
are
ususally promptly removed. If you think MSKBs on this topic on these

groups
that were carefully selected are spam, petition the boys and girls at
Redmond and Dallas campuses who monitor these groups to remove those KBs

you
don't think are relevant there.

So if it's spam, Milly why am I seeing so many posts on the other 3
groups
that I hit that are headed "Can't install Office 2003 update."
Sometimes
it's can't install Outlook SP1 or One Note SP1 and although there are a

few
reasons for each, many have the same common demonimator as the Office
2003
SP1 problem and sometimes Office 2K or Office XP install problems
outlined
above.

There's another point. Time. Some people who read the Outlook group
for
info, don't take or have time to read Office.misc, Offic.setup,
office.update but experience the problem.

Another is that you know what a KB is, and since you have so many ways
to
keep up with them at your fingertips, just don't click a topic as

irrelevant
and spammy as "Four New KBs issued on Updating Office 2003 SP1--although
I
think the volume of people I run into and see on the web having the

problems
is truly epidemic and pandemic and MSFT ought to address it with the MSI
beyond Windows Installer. V 3.00.3790.2180 in XP SP2 RTM and Office
.net/Longhorn/Version 12 that's percolating right now at Redmond,
Dallas,
and North Carolina, maybe Bangalore.

Just take a good look. There are general Office SP1 questions on each

group
that I hit. They all should be directed to office.setup or
office.update.
*but they aren't.* They are on all these Office related groups--just

look
at the posts. And Milly is right there in case Ms. Perpicia Tick
doesn't
hit it to tell them where to take their post.

There was no intent to spam and it wasn't spam. If you think it's spam,
explain why there are about 500 posts with basically the same question

with
a differential diagnosis of a very few causes that Sloan tried to hit in

the
KBs just out.

The average Office user isn't going to read the KBs at all nor is their

help
disk, and unfortunately they don't know the existence of these groups,
but
that's another issue. The average Windows user wouldn't know a KB from
an
SUV unfortunately. Ask the next time your in a super market check out

line
or buying a dress. Ask how many of them are fluent in Hex or Hungarian
notation.
Sometimes just a little too much is assumed at Redmond.

I see this phenom a lot. People will duplicate post instead of cross

post,
and they will continue their threads erratically and sporadically on

diffent
groups at the same time for the same question. So one will have 5
posters
and one will have 10 posters trying to help with the exact same question
posted on different groups by the same poster at staggered intervals.

You're not speaking for everyone. It's not spam for some people. It

will
cut down on posts and frustration for more people if they read Sloan's

KBs.
I see a lot of posts on each group that I hit that should properly be
directed to One--OfficeUpdates, but they aren't. That's precisely why
the
crosspost was done. To get the KBs to people on the groups who all have
multiple "I can't get my One Note, Outlook and Office SP1 in. And there

is
more diifficulty in getting this particular SP in for Office 2003 than

there
has been for years of Windows and Office service packs. Considerably

more.

Most people are not going to be able parse KBs, GUIDs, and verbose logs

just
to update Office nor should they have to. But that's apparently the way

it
is for reasons that are still not quite clear with all due respect to
the
major etiologies as posted by MSFT. The average Office user on the
planet
is not going to metabolize these Resource Kit tools well although a lot

of
us enjoy learning about them from people kind enough and skillful enough

to
teach us (like you, like Sloan, like the Outlook and Office experts and
others). Again just yell Office Resource Kit in your supermarket
checkout
line and see if it gets the same response as "J-Lo's marrying again."

My point--all the people in your checkout line need and use Office and
Mr.
Ballmer and Mr. Gates and Mr. Sinofsky darn well hope that continues.
See
NY Times Article on Office at the bottom.

1) registry keys that are way too easily corrupted
2) Local install cache corruptions that MSFT can't fix after 11 versions

and
Office 12, Office Longhorn, Office Blackcomb, and Office .net or
whatever

in
the oven.
3) There is a tool available from the Office Resource Kit web site that

will
fix that for you. The Local Installation Source Tool that provides the
ability to repair the Local Installation Source is available for
download
from

http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/...rn/LISTool.htm.
In addition of repairing the LIS, it will also provide the ability to

move
it to another
disk drive.

2. You are seeing the following message""This patch package could not be
opened. Verify that the patch package
exists and that you can access it, or contact the application vendor to
verify that this is a valid Windows Installer patch package."
or some other patch specific issue.

Try using the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility detailed here to
uninstall
Office:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;290301

When you reinstall don't forget to not delete the local cache files at
the
end of the installation so you will have your Local Install Source
intact
and will be able to patch your Office installation without the possible

need
of the CD.

This article is speaking to concerns MSFT has about their cash cow
Office
and most of these people aren't reading newsgroups, KBs, Technet Flash,
or
any Office newsletters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/te.../16office.html

Ambitious Package to Raise Productivity (and Microsoft's Profit)
By STEVE LOHR

Published: August 16, 2004


EDMOND, Wash. - To most of the computer-using world, Microsoft Office is

the
familiar workhorse of the desktop, a collection of software for creating
documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

But for Microsoft, which is starting to see its growth slow as it ages,
reinventing that suite of old reliables - including Word, Excel and
PowerPoint - has become nothing less than a key to its future.

"Office defines business productivity," Bill Gates, Microsoft's
chairman,
told financial analysts in July. He added that "the productivity area is
probably the most important franchise that we have."

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With that focus, Microsoft is now pursuing a strategy to transform
Office
from a bundle of programs on personal computers into a family of
software
that can put Microsoft's technology deeper into the operations of

corporate
data centers. As Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, wrote
in

an
e-mail message to employees last month, "Our biggest growth opportunity
is
with our existing base of Office users."

Microsoft is banking on the Office initiative to help it fend off the
challenge from open-source software and other competitors. But if the
plan
stumbles, Microsoft's hopes for sustained growth and greater profits
could
come under heavy pressure.

The logic of building on the Office franchise is not hard to see, given

that
it has more than 90 percent of the market for office software

applications.

The information worker business at Microsoft, which is nearly all from
Office, had revenues of $10.8 billion in the year ended in June, and
operating profit of more than $7.15 billion. As a stand-alone business,
Office - which on average sells for about $275 - would be slightly
larger
than the second-largest software company, Oracle, and far more
profitable.
Only the Windows operating system, the other pillar of Microsoft, is
slightly larger.

Traditional Office programs helped enhance productivity by allowing

workers
to easily create and modify digital documents. The aim of the new

initiative
is to increase the productivity with new tools for collaboration,
communications, planning and document handling.

New programs - like SharePoint, LiveMeeting, OneNote and InfoPath - have
been introduced in the last year or so as part of the "Office system," a
term Microsoft adopted last fall to replace "Office suite."

The new design makes programs like Word, Excel and Outlook e-mail part
of
collaborative work spaces. In theory, a worker working in Word could tap
into all the corporate information on a customer or project.

"Making collaboration faster, easier and more efficient will be the next
revolution in worker productivity, and we want to be in the forefront,"

said
Peter Rinearson, vice president for new business development in

Microsoft's
information worker group. "The goal is to make Office a tool that
steadily
delivers productivity improvements. It becomes a competitive advantage
for
the companies that use it well. If you don't have it, you can't keep
up."

Automating collaborative work, economists and analysts agree, is a

promising
frontier for productivity gains. The low-cost, networked communications
of
the Internet make it a possibility. But there is a long way to go.

Analysts
estimate that 95 percent of today's workers use the telephone and e-mail

for
team projects. Microsoft has plenty of competition in the emerging
market,
and Office's past success could prove an obstacle.

"Microsoft is trying to make Office less a product and more like an
online
service," said Nate Root, an analyst for Forrester Research. "Adoption
is
going to be slow because Microsoft is trying to change the paradigm.
It's

a
fundamental cultural change in how people think of and use Office."

Yet across the Microsoft corporate campus, there is only optimism.

Anoop Gupta, a former Stanford University professor and a vice president

of
Microsoft's real-time collaboration group, points to Microsoft's own
experience with Web conferencing as proof of the new efficiencies. The
company's use of LiveMeeting, a Microsoft conferencing program, has
increased to 40,000 hours a week from 2,000 hours a week a year ago. Mr.
Gupta says that one of every five face-to-face meetings can be replaced

with
Web conferencing tools, and Microsoft estimates that it will save $70
million in reduced travel this year.



Continued
1 | 2 | Next


Best,

Chad Harris
____________________________________________

"Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]"


wrote in message ...
While we know that you mean well, please do not spam the news groups. A
simple posting to m.p.o.misc would have been sufficient.



__________________________________________________ ______________________

--
Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]

Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact. Due to
the (insert latest virus name here) virus, all mail sent to my personal
account will be deleted without reading.

After searching google.groups.com and finding no answer, Chad Harris

asked:

| *Recent KBs that May Help with the Epidemic or Pandemic of Office 2003
| Installation Problems*
|
|
| You cannot update your Office 2003 program to Service Pack 1 (August
| 17, 2004)
| http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;EN-US;884298
|
| Description of numbering scheme for product code GUIDs in Office 2003
| (August 17, 2004)
| http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=832672
|
| Frequently asked questions about the local install source feature in
| Office 2003(August 17, 2004)
| http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=830168
|
| How to troubleshoot an update installation by using log files in
| Office 2003 (August 13, 2004)
| http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=884290
|
| hth,
|
| Chad Harris








 




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