Browsing SharePoint server from Word not possible

Quite puzzled today when I tried to save a file from Word to SharePoint. I got the message “You can’t open this location using this program. Please try a different location”. After googling a little bit I found a solution for my problem. This only seems to be happening when you try to open or save files to SharePoint from office application on a Windows Server OS. In my case the OS was Windows Server 2008 R2 so that checked out correctly.

To solve the problem you need to install the feature “Desktop Experience”.

- Go to Server Manager
- Click on “Features”
- Click on “Add Features”
- Select “Desktop Experience” and install additional required components if Windows asks you to

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- Click “Next”
- Click “Install”
- Restart the server

Unknown error occurred while tracking email via CRM Outlook client

Seems that quite a lot of people have already experienced some kind of error with the CRM Outlook client. Today was one of those days again where I experienced an error. I did a clean install of the CRM 2011 Outlook client and connected to the CRM 2011 on premises environment. All seemed to be going extremely well. My contacts were being synchronized etc…

I wanted to track an email in CRM so I clicked the button “Track”. First a little pause and then boom, an error box popped up saying “An unknown error occurred while synchronizing data to Outlook.”.

ScreenHunter_09 Apr. 06 10.55

Ok not much to go with so I checked if there were any logs in the log directory: (“c:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\MSCRM”)

No results there so I had to find a different solution to get some more information. I enabled tracing in Diagnostics tool that comes with the CRM 2011 Outlook client.

ScreenHunter_09 Apr. 06 12.56

Tried to track the email again to get that error box again and looked in the tracing file. (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\MSCRM\Traces)

Now I did find something:

[2012-04-06 11:08:08.6] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | CMailItemHelper::HrRetrieveAndSetRegardingIdInOutlook File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\emailhelper.cpp Line: 999
>hr = 0×80004004
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.7] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | CMailItemHelper::HrPromoteMailItemInCrm File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\emailhelper.cpp Line: 1754
>hr = 0×80004004
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.7] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | CMailItemHelper::HrCreateInCrm File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\emailhelper.cpp Line: 1406
>hr = 0×80004004
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.7] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | CMailItemHelper::HrCreateInCrm File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\emailhelper.cpp Line: 1432
>hr = 0×80004004
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.94] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | CMailItemHelper::HrCreateInCrm File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\emailhelper.cpp Line: 1452
>hr = 0×80004004
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.94] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | CMailItemHelper::HrCreateInCrm File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\emailhelper.cpp Line: 1454
>hr = 0×80004004
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.95] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | CMailItemHelper::HrPromoteItemToCrm File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\emailhelper.cpp Line: 243
>hr = 0×80004004
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.95] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | CItemHelper<struct Outlook::_MailItem>::PromoteItemToCrm File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\ItemHelper.h Line: 354
>hr = 0×80004004
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.95] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | CSyncToOutlook::SyncItemByTypeByAction File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\synctooutlook.cpp Line: 1451
>hr = 0×80004004
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.96] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | CSyncToOutlook::ProcessSyncResult File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\synctooutlook.cpp Line: 1784
>hr = 0×80004004
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.97] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | CSyncToOutlook::ProcessSyncResult File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\synctooutlook.cpp Line: 1831
>hr = 0×80004004
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.97] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | HrGetErrorDescription File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\..\common\ResourceManagerEx.h Line: 148
>hr = 0×80004005
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.99] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | HrLoadManagedString File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\..\common\ResourceManagerEx.h Line: 35
>hr = 0×80040203
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.99] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | LoadManagedString failed with hr = 0×80040203. Function: HrLoadManagedString File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\..\common\ResourceManagerEx.h Line: 37
[2012-04-06 11:08:08.100] Process:OUTLOOK |Thread:5696 |Category: Unmanaged.Platform |User: PlatformUser |Level: Error | HrGetErrorDescription File: c:\bt\32691\src\application\outlook\addin\..\common\ResourceManagerEx.h Line: 154
>hr = 0×80040203

I’m just posing that long error message so that others with the same error will hopefully have something with this post.

So how did I fix this problem?

I though I was stuck because on the forums there wasn’t much information about this issue. Here’s what I did:

1) Go into control panel
2) Open Programs and Features
3) Select “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 for Microsoft Outlook”
4) Click Uninstall/Change
5) Select Repair

ScreenHunter_09 Apr. 06 11.30

Hope this helps for you too!

Outlook PST file specifications released

This is something I read some days ago and found interesting. Last year Microsoft announced that they would publically release the PST file specifications to the public. That’s the file that MS Outlook is using to backup email, calendar and contacts to. This means that you would be able to get a better understanding of the PST file structure.

Could be handy to have if you would want to interface with this file. For instance build some functionality in your own CRM application to import contacts from the Outlook PST file.

Now MS has released the specs to MSDN, so if you are looking for this documentation, you can retrieve it here