Re: Office 2008 and Network Home Folders

Sorry to here that didn't work.  I'll probably start my own deployment of Office 2008 in the next weeks and will let you know if I have any success.

Rick

On May 22, 2008, at 1:02 AM, Lucien Courcol wrote:

Thanks for the input Rick but unfortunately this didn't fix the problem.
I've created the .TemporaryItems folder in the Users share point and give it the special permission as you explained but i was still having an error message : "myfile.docx is being used by "another user". Do you want to make a copy ?".
Again : whenever i copy the troubled file into the Groups share point, no more problems. So i suspect a problem related to the way share points handle the propagation of permission (not sure yet).

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 10:35 AM, Rick Davis <email@hidden> wrote:

On May 20, 2008, at 9:45 AM, Lucien wrote:

Message: 7
Date: Tue, 20 May 2008 09:04:53 +0700
From: "Lucien Courcol" <email@hidden>
Subject: Office 2008 and Network Home Folders
To: email@hidden
Message-ID:
       <email@hidden" target="_blank">email@hidden>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Dear all,

This is my first message here,

I'm a rookie system administrator of a small office composed of Apple
computers. All these computers are running Mac OS X 10.5.1. We also have a
special (2GB of RAM) Mac Mini that we use as our OS X Server (10.5.1).

Our server is providing basic networking services (Gateway, Firewall, NAT,
DHCP, DNS, VPN) and it's also an Open Directory Master.
Home folders of staff are stored in the server and get mounted on the
workstation via AFP (aka Network Home Folder).
Everything is working fine so far.

But here starts my problem : Recently we've upgraded to MS Office 2008, and
staff began to complain about problems while working with Word and Excel
documents, I advised them to use the latest extension .docx or xlsx which
seems to be more stable. Unfortunately for me the problems didn't stop. So
I've checked it out by myself :

Whenever staff try to open certain documents they get an error message that
says "Cannot access <concerned file>" and click ok. After 2 or 3 attempts
the file gets opened.
Another issue is : Right away after closing a document, when staff try to
open it again, they get an error message : "<concerned file> is being used
by "another user". Do you want to make a copy ?"

People from other Apple related forums told me it's a permission issue but i
doubt about that because :
1) I haven't change anything to the default permission settings used for the
Network Home Folder sharepoint.
2) If i use Apple's iWork, i get no problems, files open fine.

Even the newly released Service Pack 12.1.0 doesn't fix any of these
problems !

I really would like to get rid of these problems with Office '08 and stop
hearing staff complains.

I'm also wondering that i shouldn't be the only one having these problems
since Network Home Folders and Office 2008 are commonly used in business
(and my setup is about everything but special).

Have you ever experienced the same issues : how did you solve your problems,
any workarounds ? ...

Thx a lot in advance !

--
Lucien Courcol

Hi Lucien,

Is this a new setup? Or an upgrade from an Office 2004 with network home directories setup?

I haven't started upgrading to Office 2008 yet.  All previous versions of Office (at least as far back as Office 98 through 2004) have required a "fix" that involves creating an invisible folder named .TemporaryItems that is r/w for all users on any volume that is used for storing Office documents.

The following commands should work (the 1 in the chmod command sets the sticky bit that protects the folder from being deleted or moved).

$ cd /path/to/volume/or/sharepoint
$ sudo mkdir .TemporaryItems
$ chmod 1777 .TemporaryItems

Hope this helps.

Rick Davis, ACHDS
thePRIMAXgroup
Cincinnati, OH
(513)910-9490
http://www.applehelp.org

--
Lucien Courcol