Missing user shortcut / icons and permissions in Outlook / EV6

Hi Nick,

there are a couple of pretty basic things to check first. Apologies if these are so obvious that you have not bothered to mention them but can you confirm them before we look into things more deeply as they need to be discounted?

(1) Have you published the Organisational Forms into your live Exchange system? Can the client see them (i.e. have they replicated to the client’s PF store?). If you have published them and flagged them as not visible it can be hard to check this so I suggest you load the EV Shortcut form into the local Outlook forms library of the PC that is having the problems and see if it fixes stuff. Let me know if you need advice on how to do that. If it does fix the problem then we need to look at publishing your Organisation Forms properly I’d guess.

(2) Have you cleared the Forms Cache? It corrupts A LOT on older Outlook versions (i.e. pre Outlook 2003 SP1). The cache will be stored in the users profile (location varies on client O/S) in sub folders called \Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\FORMS. Delete everything (including all subfolders) in this folder (leave it in the recycle bin in case you want to get it back), but especially delete the FRMCACHE.DAT file. It’s actually quite unlikely to be this giving the problem as I would expect Outlook to give an error when displaying any shortcuts in its active window (something like "Unable to load Form, Outlook will use a default form instead")

Hope this helps, please feedback.



David
http://messy.bravehost.com/

Whether the icons are displayed or not is down to Outlook doing it's job not EV at that point.

The forms should be getting downloaded from the forms library after the user tries and opens an archived item. Does opening an archived item work?
Try installing the EV forms into the users personal forms library and check if that works (then if it does you know it's just a forms library issue).
It might be a permission problem on the organisational forms library which means users cannot download from it...

Hi,

Thanks for the answers.

Nothing is ever to obvious when something is new and you are trying to work to a deadline. I did publish the forms following notes in EV6 install.

Both answers have pointed me in the right direction, and indicates that EV6 is working fine.

It does all seem to be related to the Forms, as when I checked on the Administrator profile the forms are there in the FORMS folder, but on a user they are not.

I have manually installed on one user, but nothing changed. Deleted cache file, restarted Outlook and now I get the icons. That's the good news.

The bad news is that now I am unable to restore from the Archive with either the toolbar Icon or the shortcut.

I am guessing I have a problem with the Forms in the Exchange server (ignorance showing here but I assume I have a security setting that is not allowing them to execute correctly)

Still all works with the user's mailbox if I am in as Administrator.

Do you know what right the user has to have in Exchange for the forms to work ?

Nick

Nick,

worth checking your Org Forms permissions then. Start Exchange System Manager. Go to your Administrative Group. Select Folders. Then right click on Public Folders and choose "View System Folders". Open EFORMS REGISTRY. You may have a big structure under here or maybe "Organisational Forms". It depends how your system is set up. Either way, the folder you want is the one you published the EV Form in! Right click it and select properties. Go to the Permissions tab and click on the Client Permissions button.

** If you have Outlook on the machine running ESM then you may get an error here where Client Permissions cannot resolve. This is (I think) due to MAPIsvc32.dll being swapped out. The easiest thing is to make sure you run ESM on a server without Outlook on it but if you need the workaround let me know. **

The top permissions should be Default. You want this to be set as "Reviewer". If it's missing or set lower than this add or change is and see if it fixes the problem.

If you want to load the EV Forms locally into Outlook you have to do it for each user. If you load them locally as Administrator then log off and log on as a user they won't be local. Outlook will always look for a Form locally and if it fails to fins it then it will go to the PF store. It is still worth making sure the non-privileged user definitely has a local copy of the EV Forms (check in Outlook), clear the Cache (with Outlook shut) and the start Outlook again.

Have you got Office 2003 SP1 installed? There is a bug in vanilla 2003 that impacts its ability to cache Org Forms.

Cheers

David
http://messy.bravehost.com/

David,

Checked in Exchange and have now set Default to Reviewer and that seems to be ok. We just have the Orf Forms as we have never used Exchange for anything but email so have never uses Forms or Public folders.

I will check on a new built client tomorrow and see if it all works automatically with the forms.

With the manual fix yesterday, the reason I could not get the archives in and out automatically was behing all the Outlook / EV6 windows was a proxy login window. As soon as I put an exception in the proxy server for the EV6 site it now gets and puts directly from the link in Outlook.

I am not sure about the SP1 on Office on all the clients, so I am just updating one of the clients that was vanilla to make sure it is all the latest version.

My test machine is all up to date, but as per the first question it all worked fine as I had always used the administrator mailbox.

The best thing out of all of this is that I now know how to manually fix a client, so at least I can give the Helpdesk a document to help when they roll this out to the users. Knowing the quick fix means that with most of the users on Citrix we can just fix their profiles before they even get the problem.

Thanks for the help. Untill next time....

Nick