Real World Computing
Vista vices
Office file formats
I couldn't make up this stuff. Even my foetid imagination, in its darkest moments, couldn't think up a trick like the one just pulled by the Office team at Microsoft, which decided to remove access to a whole pile of admittedly old Office file formats in the latest Office 2003 update. It didn't ask if you wanted this to happen, but just did it. And once you found what had happened, it wasn't possible to uninstall the patch.
The Office team then decided that maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all and created a web page that documents all the Registry hacks you'll need to undo what they just did to you. And, apparently, there will be a utility along real soon to do it all for you. Magnanimity abounds.
SMB
The news that the SAMBA group of developers has got hold of the core documentation and source code for the SMB interfaces is welcome. Emboldened by EU rulings, they've backed Microsoft into a corner, and I applaud their actions. To understand what's involved, you need to remember that file sharing and access is done via a protocol that runs on top of whatever network protocol you have in place, so it doesn't care whether you're running TCP/IP, NetBEUI or IPX - the SMB (Simple Message Block) protocol, also known as SaMBa, lets Windows machines interoperate with each other and with other OSes. Microsoft has kept details of SMB very close to its chest over the years, requiring major work to reverse-engineer the details of the interface from third parties.
Microsoft hasn't kept the goalposts fixed, either - for Windows Server 2003, for example, it mandated that SMB connections to a Domain Controller must be encrypted, a change that caught out a lot of users at the time when they found they could still connect to their Windows member servers but not to their DCs. Microsoft ensured that the Windows client was kept up to date and in sync with these server-side changes, so there were no problems there. But try to connect from Apple Unix (aka OS X), Linux, Solaris or some other platform and you were screwed.
Getting the information out of Microsoft cost the SAMBA development team €10,000 and some thick bundles of contracts and licences, but I'm sure it was money spent for the best, not only for those of us who choose to use platforms other than Windows but for Microsoft, too. After all, the SAMBA work will hopefully not stop just with simple file access - there are all the interfaces necessary to support SharePoint access, too. I don't underestimate the amount of work ahead for this group of volunteers - even Microsoft's own Office for Mac group failed to get SharePoint support into its new release of Office 2008.
Hopefully, 2008 will bring forth a raft of SAMBA updates and extensions to better interoperate with the Windows Server 2003 platform and all the families of technologies that fit around that. I can't wait for a native, bidirectional, real-time connection to Exchange Server, for example.
