Problem description / reproduction steps

I created a custom entity in CRM 2011 to use as a joining entity in a manual N:N relationship. In this scenario it was an “Attendance” record to link a Contact to an Event, and enable the business to track the status of the attendance (tentative, confirmed, attended, cancelled) along with relevant dates etc.

To reduce effort on the user’s part I made the primary “description” field on the record auto-filled based on the event and contact name, using jscript web resources. To observe sensible UI practice, I made sure the lookup fields came at the top of the form, then the description which was a result of those, so it should be obvious to the user what to fill in first, then by the time they get to the name field it is already filled in.

A blank new record form is shown below.

So, what went wrong?

When the user creates a new record, they expect to be able to get on with the job of typing in the fields. Although the Event or Contact was automatically filled in if they created the record from the context of the parent record to make life even easier, this still means that sometimes they needed to fill in one or the other field, and that’s where it got strange.

The Event field is first on the form, and you might naturally expect it to take focus when the form loads, ready for typing. No such luck. Even worse, it was not possible to click in this field and start typing to use recent items or wait for the record name to be resolved. Clicking where the mouse is pointing in the screenshot did nothing; the field behaved almost as if it was disabled. Except the lookup button itself was enabled and the user could click here, do a search and choose a record that way, albeit that takes longer.

Nothing I did or could think of would work, the field simply would not take focus at all. This was using IE9 and CRM Online – all latest stuff, surely that should work best?

So how did I fix it?

As it happens I had another bug with IE9. If I got impatient waiting for a form to load, or realised I had clicked in the wrong place and did not want to load the wrong things, I would usually just close the window before it finished loading. This turns out to be a great way to crash IE9 using CRM – if you close a form before it is fully loaded and rendered, it can kill you whole session, which is far from ideal when you have several windows open, especially in the middle of a batch of customisations.

So I logged that bug on the Connect website. And someone from MS helpfully replied with a possible fix, by changing a registry key for IE9, ironically designed to guard against the browser hanging (well, I guess crashing would tend to avoid a hang…)

So I applied the fix:

Create the following Registry Key Value to disable the Hang Resistance feature:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\
Type: REG_DWORD
Name: HangRecovery
Value: 0

and I still don’t know if it will stop IE9 crashing quite so much, but it sure has helped my ‘broken’ form to work properly. Now it takes the focus on the correct field when I click on it, and even opens the form with the focus already where it should be.

So I sorted it by trying to fix something else altogether. Typical. What’s the best thing you’ve ever managed to get working without actually knowing how?

CRM 2011 Update Rollup 6 has been was temporarily withdrawn

The downloads for UR6 were down for a while but are now back up, showing a published date of 20th Jan 2012 and a build number of 5.0.9690.1992 as opposed to 5.0.9689.1985 as was the case when they were first released. All the links and URLs remain the same, only the actual files to download have changed.

Microsoft still have not published any official information that I can find as to why UR6 was removed from the download center, what faulty behaviour it had and how critical the issue was.

“Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure”

My recommendation if you already installed the redacted UR6 for the Outlook client is to uninstall the CRM client completely and re-install. It seems happy to keep configuration settings and evens saved credentials (eg for CRM online) so this is relatively painless and much more certain to work.

I previously tried just running setup over the top and was asked if I wanted to uninstall or repair the app, so I chose ‘repair’ but on checking in the Outlook client under File > CRM > About Microsoft Dynamics CRM it still showed the old build number, so I was not convinced this worked very well.*

*your mileage may vary. If you have applied the new build over the top on the server or any other components I’d be grateful if you could share any useful information or experiences in the comments for others to benefit from.

Original and edited blog post…

What is in UR6 and where to download it

A very quick post to get people straight to the information and downloads:

The Support KB article 2600640 about CRM 2011 update rollup 6 and all the fixes included is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2600640 Note: you can’t uninstall UR6

Downloads of the update rollups for server, router, clients, BIDS, MUI etc. are all here <edit> and are now all updated to build 5.0.9690.1992 :

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28712

If you have downloaded some of the updates and are not sure which ones you have, either go and download them again “just in case”, or if you have slow download speeds or limits on your total data volumes you could check the MD5 hashes first:

Outlook client UR6 32 bit (update only) has an MD5 hash of F537E8C3FF3FF1BA76028C07713B50F6, while the 64 bit client is 78CBBD33E035C9DDF5794F13B000243E.

Server is 64 bit only, and the MD5 is 1753B49EB935D051A4B319EFCC7265F3

Install and update ready-rolled

You can also get updated versions of the installation files with UR6 “slipstreamed” in so you can install in new deployments in one step rather than two.

Outlook clients with UR6 built-in can be downloaded here:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27821 (don’t forget you need the 32bit i386 or 64 bit AMD64 version to match your Office install, not your OS version). MD5 hash for 32 bit version which most people are probably looking to install is 426EBAB49CEA5EDEE0018DEB137AB09C

Download Dynamics CRM 2011 server with UR6 built in:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27822

Build number should be 5.0.9690.1992 after you have installed things.

If you are using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and download the Outlook client today <edit: this is what I wrote on 12th January when the update was first released>, this is already at UR6 (just in time for go live on my current project as it happens!). For on premises or existing installations, install the UR6 update files or wait for them to come out via Windows Update on January 24th.

<edit: this date has not been changed in the KB article since the re-release of the new build, so it seems like this is still on track>

Happy Rollups!

Just for the record…

Earlier I updated this post because UR6 was pulled for a while, so just for posterity and to make sure any readers have the full picture and are not confuzled, here’s what that edited bit said:

A possible problem seems to have arisen with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 UR6 and the downloads have been withdrawn from the download centre pending further investigation by Microsoft so the URLs in this blog post do not currently work.

If you have already downloaded UR6 the advice is to not install this and await a later re-release before installing. Since UR6 cannot be uninstalled (other than completely uninstalling CRM 2011 this is a bit of a blow if you have already gone ahead with it, but hopefully the fixed version will be able to install over the top.

According to the article on the “CRM in the Field” blog this affects the Outlook client, so it may turn out not to be an issue for the server or other components:

“A Microsoft CRM 2011 Client for Microsoft Outlook issue has surfaced, and the Update Rollup 6 packages for Client and Server are being temporarily removed from the Microsoft Download Center pending our investigation. Please hold off on downloading Update Rollup 6 until new packages are available.

If you have downloaded UR6 packages for any components, please discard them and wait for an update on our investigation and the release of new packages.  If you have installed them, please note that the issue appears to be related to Outlook Client sync and prepare to install a newer build when it is available.”

Where to get it

The main information page is KB article 2547347 Update Rollup 3 for Dynamics CRM 2011, and the downloads can be found at download centre page 26912 CRM 2011 UR3 for servers and clients. The update will also be available via Windows Update and therefore also ready to deploy via WSUS on August 9th (or possibly 23rd, since both dates are shown on the KB page).

There are no prerequisites for UR3: you don’t already need to have UR1 or UR2 as this also contains everything that was fixed in those so it’s ready to roll out – what are you waiting for?*

Note that one of the fixes (see below) introduces a new setting in the organisation database which does nothing unless and until you supply a value.

* with the exception of one fix in UR2 which needs to be manually applied if applicable to you: KB 2535245 “You experience slow performance when you perform RetrieveMultiple queries on large datasets in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011”

Highlights

Here are some of the issues which are fixed in UR3 which  I think you are most likely to notice in day to day work with fairly normal deployments:

• The search results for system views in the Dynamics CRM 2011 client for Outlook are not compliant with the search results in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM web client.
• Assume that you have a contact who has the Business Phone field populated. When you add a new phone call activity by using the ribbon from the Activities area, the Phone Number field is not populated in the phone call activity.
• The Help files are updated.
• Assume that you configure the Dynamics 2011 client for Outlook. You browse to the Account folder or the Contact folder. In this situation, you experience slow performance when ribbons and menus are rendered.
• The Dynamics CRM 2011 client for Outlook initiates background send requests to the CRM server. This behaviour can cause high server load and decreased performance because these requests are not throttled. This fix throttles these background send requests.The Start Date field in the Fiscal Year Settings dialog box does not display the date that is converted according to the user time zone settings.
• When you add a user in a multi-site domain, you experience slow performance after you click Save.
• Assume that you enable auditing for the Contact entity. If you use a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Client for Outlook, an auditing log is displayed every 15 minutes or every time that the Outlook client is synchronized with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.
• When you export a static Microsoft Excel worksheet with non-English operating system settings, the Currency values are multiplied by 10,000.
• If an organization starts many asynchronous operations, the Asynchronous Service allocates many resources to process those requests from the organization. In this situation, other organizations will have an increasing backlog of asynchronous operations. This fix introduces a new deployment setting, called AsyncSelectMaxItems, in the DeploymentProperties table. This setting limits the number of items that can be processed by a single organization at one time. By default, the value is not set. It can be set manually if you experience this issue.

You can now download the whole service pack file as a self-extracting executable and simply run it to install, or you can use Windows Update, where it is listed as an Important/High Priority update (rather than critical or security) for you to manually install (after 90 days this will change to an automatic update if your system is configured for that). At the moment my 32 bit install claims this would take 409 MB via Windows Update compared with only 361 MB for the full exe package download.

Even if you only have 1 machine to do, you will save marginally on the file size if you manually download Office 2010 sp1, and then of course you will have the file to use again on any other machines that need it – if like me you are the de facto IT support for family and friends, this can be quite useful.

A few key changes relating to other products are that Outlook 2010 sp1 will fully support the now-released Office 365 online business applications suite, while SharePoint 2010 will support SQL 2011 and has improved support for users of Internet Explorer 9.

So, there’s lots of information about this important update, as well as the downloads themselves, so let’s dive straight in with a load of links to the things you probably want to get hold of straight away.

Office 2010 information and downloads

KB 2460049 Information page for Office 2010 sp1 + links to downloads
MS Support KB 2460049 Office 2010 SP1

Main Downloads Office 2010 sp1
Office 2010 sp1 – for 32-bit editions of Office
Office 2010 sp1 – for 64-bit editions of Office

SharePoint 2010

Since this is 64 bit only, there’s only one service pack download to consider.
SharePoint 2010 sp1 information
SharePoint 2010 service pack 1 download

System Administrator Information

If you manage many machines and don’t intend to deploy this by actually running the exe file on every computer on your network, you can deploy the update using WSUS, or you can extract the MSP files from the package using a command line and deploy the ones you need.
KB 2532118 has details of which MSP files are in which service pack download

You may also want to find out how to patch those other bits and pieces of the Office suite which are not necessarily part of a core installation, such as Access runtime, Visio viewer or the language packs.
KB 2510609 has details of all the different Office 2010 sp1 packages
KB 2532120 has details of the SharePoint 2010 packages

The Office Sustained Engineering blog has a page with direct links to the download pages for all the different packages for Office 2010 and SharePoint in a big long list arranged alphabetically, with columns for the article with information about that patch, and 32 / 64 bit downloads (as applicable).

There are a few “gotchas” with sp1, most notably for people using SharePoint 2010 and Office Web Apps, and regarding SharePoint workflows on new site collections. This support article is likely to be added to as reports come in of any bugs found once this starts being used around the world, so it may be worth revisiting the page again in a few weeks.
Details of known issue with service pack 1 for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010

Excel Worksheets of Changes

Another very useful resource for IT administrators and interested geeks is a complete Excel Worksheet (.xlsx) of all the changes, issues fixed etc. While the descriptions of each one are pretty short and usually describe the old symptom (issue) rather than the new behaviour, this could be a useful quick check to see if this service pack will finally fix something odd that your users have been complaining about. There are two files, one for Office 2010 and the other for SharePoint 2010 and Office Servers:
Microsoft Office 2010 Service Pack 1 Changes.xlsx
SharePoint 2010 and Office Servers Service Pack 1 Changes.xlsx

Group Policy files updated

When Office 2010 was released to manufacture, the necessary files for managing the suite using Group Policy and the Office Customisation Tool (OCT) were available at the same time, and with the release of sp1 these tools have also been updated to version 2, which is great news, and certainly an improvement over the delays that were common for Office 2007 and the service packs for that.

There are two versions of the admin files to download, depending on whether you wish to target the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Office – the version you use does not depend on the OS of the server or workstation you are using to manage your Group Policies, so you would use the 32-bit version to mange the users that have 32-bit Office 2010 installed, even if your management console is on Windows 7 64 bit or Windows Server 2008 R2.

Updated admin files for Office 2010 sp1 – ADM/ADMX+ADML and OPAX+OPAL

The same page also has a link to the usual Excel workbook of all the Group Policy and OCT settings reference for Office 2010 but this is just the same old file that has been around since the RTM version, so don’t waste time downloading this. (At the time of writing this blog post the file linked from that page has the same MD5 hash as the one which has been available since at least last August).

The admin files download extracts to three folders for ADM / ADMX and Admin (OCT) files, as well as an updated spreadsheet listing all the settings. So, while this is not as detailed as the full settings reference, it does at least seem to have more settings, although I have not yet found any which are particularly interesting to report.

The Office Sustained Engineering blog has an announcement that Service Pack 1 for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 is on track for release at the end of June.

As you might expect, this will include a roll up all previous patches and cumulative updates, as well some minor feature changes.

Update 28th June 2011: It’s here!

Read all about it and find links to all sorts of information and resources: Office 2010 sp1 available for download

Change to Outlook reminders dialogue

One of the changes declared for Service Pack 1 will be to revert the behaviour of the reminders window in Outlook 2010 back to the way it worked in 2007 thanks to sustained pressure from various contributors on the Microsoft Answers forums.

In Outlook 2007 when you snooze a reminder it remembers how long you snoozed that item for, and next time it comes up that is the default time chosen so you can very easily hit snooze again for the same delay. Each item (calendar entry, task or follow up) remembers it’s own interval so you can snooze a meeting later today maybe 15 minutes at a time, but a reminder about a conference next month a whole day at a time.

Outlook 2010 changed this behaviour so that each time you snooze any item, the time interval chosen is remembered for the next item as well, which means some people found they had to keep changing this back and forth between different values, and might snooze something for too long without realising – possibly ending up being late for that important meeting for example. Service Pack 1 will switch this behaviour back to the 2007 method, and it sounds like this will just happen, rather than providing the user with any option to choose which approach works better for them.

Which way would you prefer this to work? Let us know via the comments.

No news on Outlook 2010 holiday errors

For over a year now people using Outlook 2010 have been able to add public holidays for their country, with the slight problem that many of these holidays have several errors in at least 23 countries around the world . I have actually seen some people report the problem and offer fixes for it which still contain some of the incorrect dates, or “corrections” which introduce different faults.

Hopefully Microsoft will stick to their plan of including fixes in the service pack to finally address this problem, but there is no detail available on this yet, but we’ll update this with any news when it arrives.

In a TechNet flash email I received this week, entitled “Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 SP1 Arrives” the only reference to a service pack was this:

“Windows Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 is ready with new virtualization tools, web resources, management enhancements, and Windows 7 integration.”

Not a resoundingly clear message about Windows 7 sp1 availability. So I checked my Windows updates which had a handful of Office things, the usual Malicious Software Removal tool update and a couple of vaguely worded items which I included as well. No service pack to be seen. Next step, search engine!

The first hit on a Google search for Windows 7 sp1 was a page which referred to a couple of ways to download and install it, but none of the links would work, because the page was for the OEM channel (and I am not an OEM partner). Probably useful for those who did want this page, less so for the masses who just want it installing.

I did then find a page called “Learn how to install Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1)”, clearly designed on purpose to make this easy to find and use. It opens with this information (my emphasis):

“Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is an important update that includes previously released security, performance, and stability updates for Windows 7. Installing SP1 helps keep Windows 7 up to date.”

So I was surprised to find that this was not listed as an update for me to choose. But I noticed further down the page this little disclaimer:

“Note: If SP1 isn’t listed, you might need to install some other updates before installing SP1. Install any important updates, return to the Windows Update page, and then click Check for updates again.”

After installing the bunch of updates I had and restarting the machine as required, I checked Windows Update again. Service Pack 1 still not listed there, but now some fix for .Net that was not there before. Installed that, restarted and now, finally I get the choice to choose sp1 as an update. Seems curious that to install a service pack that includes all previous hotfixes, updates and whatnot, that I have to install all those previous fixes first before I even get the option. I expect many people will have given up at this point, thinking “oh well, must be already installed then or it would be nagging me to do it, surely?”

If you do manage to convince Windows Update that you have already installed enough of the previous fixes, you will see something like this, listing sp1 as hotfix KB976932:

Downloading the whole service pack

If you have several separate machines to patch, or are the kind of person who regularly rebuilds machines or VMs, or you are the de facto go-to support person for family and friends you may want to download the service pack so that you can run it from a USB thumb drive without any fuss or delay. Of course this is especially useful if you have good old dialup or a tightly-capped broadband connection.

Of course if you are running an IT department with any kind of central control you should be using WSUS to control and push out updates after testing them first to make sure they don’t cause any issues in your particular environment.

First, head to the download page for Windows 7 service pack 1. After doing the usual genuine advantage check and scratching your head for a while at the strange array of choices, you will almost certainly want one or both of these links on that page (or right click on the link(s) below and choose “save link as” or whatever is normal for your browser, but you will have had to pass validation in that browser session first as far as I can tell):

windows6.1-KB976932-X64.exe – that’s sp1 for Windows 6.1 (aka 7!) 64 bit editions

windows6.1-KB976932-X86.exe – sp1 for Windows 6.1/7 32 bit

Be warned that these are pretty hefty – the 64 bit version weighs in at 925 MB, almost three times the size of XP sp3 and twice the size of Vista sp1 as a comparison. The Windows update route is supposed to take away most of this pain by only downloading bits you really need, but as described above there might be scenarios where it actually makes more sense to take the hit once.

I have not bothered to download the full ISO to burn a DVD with both 32 bit and 64 bit on, since that was larger than these two added together. Nor have I bothered with the debugging stuff as I can’t see me using that realistically.

Once you have service pack 1 downloaded you can install it by double clicking, and after providing credentials for UAC you see this and everything should be self-explanatory from there:

In this article I will describe some of the errors, list corrected dates and provide links to files I have prepared with the fixes already in to save you some typing. I have also posted a separate article about adding and removing holidays from your Outlook calendar, rather than making this one even longer with a great big discussion about the mechanics of doing this.

Background

When you add holidays to Outlook, they are read in from a specially formatted text file, formerly outlook.txt, now (since 2002?) renamed to outlook.hol but essentially the same thing. This contains sections for various countries and a couple of religions, so that you can easily choose the ones you are interested in. This approach has a couple of limitations but some upsides too:

• each holiday is specified as a single date, so even things which have on obvious recurrence pattern must be included several times for different years, which means only a limited number are included in the interests of file size
• it is hugely subject to human error, as we will see
• when there are errors, at least you can easily fix them by editing the file or replacing it with one someone else has done (like me)
• you can add extra sections for “countries” you want to include, such as for a special interest group, or additional company holidays (such as winter shutdown periods)

Outlook 2010 errors

The version of the outlook.hol file which shipped with Outlook 2010 final version (RTM) has some serious flaws in it, affecting at least 23 countries as far as I can see (basically most of Europe as well as Australia and New Zealand), and likely many others I have not been able to identify. As I mentioned above, because of the way this file is used, this is relatively easy to fix as it is not an actual bug in the program, but is still very annoying, especially for anybody that has already imported the incorrect holidays.

After much effort, a couple of phone calls and emails and a long-winded web form, I finally managed to log a support call with Microsoft* – not to get a solution (since I could easily fix the problem for my own individual case and share that with my clients as well) but to alert them to the breadth of the problem so they might come up with a hotfix (as they have done before for similar problems) or include an updated file in the next service pack. So far there seems to be some dragging of feet and although they have said they are hoping to get a hotfix out I got bored waiting and thought I might as well share the information I have so that others might benefit. (Update: MS have now closed the support call, saying a fix will come out with sp1 and no sooner)

I have a client with several hundred users in the UK and thousands worldwide who are migrating from Lotus Domino (Notes) to Exchange right now, and I want to be able to work with them to make sure they get a fixed version of the file before users start adding holidays all over the place.

Four main problem areas

I first noticed the problem with the holidays because of some incorrect dates for Easter Monday. I was also adding school holidays to Outlook and realised the Spring bank holiday in 2012 is not the usual last-Monday-in-May. I also spotted that Christmas and Boxing Day always show on the “correct” dates, when I really need to see the Bank Holidays if this is to be useful at all. In the end this got me digging deeper in the file and I found four main classes of problem relating to the UK and many other countries too:

• Incorrect dates for Easter Monday from 2013 to 2019 (or 2020 in some cases)
• No lieu days shown for Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day when they fall on a weekend
• No additional holidays for Scotland (even though there are holidays for Northern Ireland included in the UK)
• UK Spring Bank Holiday is incorrect for 2012 since there is a special case because of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Update: there is also now an additional public holiday in the UK on 29th April 2011 for the Royal Wedding, although to be fair to Microsoft they could not have known about that since it had not been announced.

Note: I have only checked the English language version of the file so it is possible that for some of the countries I have identified as having incorrect dates, those dates might be correct in the files that would normally be used in those countries in their native language. The cynical side of my head says that may not be the case…

How to fix the holidays file

There are a few different approaches you can take here, which largely depend on whether you just want a one-off fix for your own machine, or a wider-scale rollout for an entire organisation. You can use a file someone else has already corrected (such as the ones I have created and linked to below) or go in and fix, amend and add to the file yourself.

First let’s look at where the file is and how it is formatted so you can make changes to it if you want to.

Finding the outlook.hol file

The outlook.hol file is shared between all users as it is stored along with your installation of Outlook. This is in:

<program files>\Microsoft Office\Office<version>\<LCID>

The <program files> folder would usually be C:\Program Files\ unless you are running a 32-bit version of Office on a 64-bit version of Windows (quite common now for Office 2010 on Windows 7), in which case you need the one in C:\Program files (x86)\.

The <version> is the internal version number, so 2010 is version 14, 2007 was v12, 2003 is v11 and so on (there’s no unlucky version 13!).

The <LCID> is the “locale ID” associated with the country and language of your installation. There is a list of all Locale IDs Assigned by Microsoft on MSDN which you can use to identify which one you need, but notice that the code used here is for the language of your installation not necessarily proofing tools or anything else you configured – so in the case of most (all?) of the English speaking world, the code you are looking for is 1033 for US English, as that is the language the program runs in, even if you have things like British English spell checking enabled (the .lex files used by proofing tools are not stored in LCID folders, but simply named according to language such as MSSP7ES.LEX for the Spanish spell checking dictionary). There is no installation for British English, Strine or any other variation.

The path on my machine running Office 2010 32 bit edition installed in US English, on a Windows 7 64-bit machine is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\1033

In that folder you will find the Outlook.hol file, which any user can access, but only administrators can modify it. So, the best thing to at this stage is simply to copy it then paste it somewhere else such as your My Documents folder or some temporary directory. This is sensible practice anyway, as you probably want to work on a copy of the file rather than editing the original in situ.

If you create your own version or borrow mine you can use this without putting it anywhere special, although I would recommend replacing the original broken

Structure of the holidays file

The file has a very simple structure, with a section for each country which is named inside square brackets followed by a number indicating how many entries there are for that location. For example:

[Australia] 172
Anzac Day,2009/4/25
Anzac Day,2010/4/25
Anzac Day,2011/4/25
… …

In the built-in file the countries are listed alphabetically, although this makes no difference as Outlook will always present the list in alphabetical order regardless of the way they are arranged in the file. If you want to add an extra country (such as Scotland) or a non-country (for additional company days off perhaps) you can do this anywhere, and the end of the file is probably a good place for these.

Each date entry has the form of a label for the day, a comma then the date in yyyy/m/d format. I have seen documentation claiming that this should be yyyy/mm/dd which is strange since the built-in entries don’t do that, and as far as my tests have shown, you can use either form, but you must use four digit years.

So now you can change any incorrect entries to fix them simply by editing the existing text, but what about adding new dates?

Adding extra holidays

You may want to add some additional dates for your country (that sounds surreally patriotic – “Add a holiday – do it for your country, comrade!”) which is easy enough to do, and you can even paste in whole chunks if you want to, but you must remember to change the number of entries at the top next to the country name accordingly.

If you add lines but don’t increase the number, things will appear to work but when you import the holidays Outlook will simply read the number of lines indicated and stop, so you may miss out loads of holidays you wanted to import. For each of the errors described in detail later in this article I have included the number of holidays listed so if you are using these to edit the file yourself you know what number to add. The section for United Kingdom has 172 to start with, so if you extend the dates for some holidays out to 2035 that adds 3 x 7 = 21, then add the lieu days for Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year (3 x 8 = 24), then add the three corrected dates for May/June 2012 minus the incorrect one, plus a Royal Wedding this is a total of +48 = 220 lines total.

If you remove lines for any reason (such as holidays which are not observed across the whole country) and forget to decrease the number, you will get error messages when you try to import, but as far as I can see no damage is done, it simply imports as many as it can and either runs into the next country or the end of the file and stops. If you are editing the file in order for other people to use it you want to make sure you have eliminated any issues like this, so do make sure the number is correct. If you don’t want to see the Battle of the Boyne or St. Patrick’s Day for example you could remove these and decrease the count by 40 (leaving 132 based on the original file, or 180 with my suggested amendments).

Using or sharing your corrected file

Once you have a new version of your holiday file you can simply double click on it to add the holidays from there – you don’t need to put the file in any particular folder or give it a special name. This is fine for a quick one-off but less useful for administrators wanting to help out their whole company’s users. A simple option if you are just distributing a few updates such as additional company dates would be to email the file out to people or put it in a fileshare that users have access to, but this still means that anyone who uses the normal method to add holidays will get the wrong dates too, so you may be better to replace the file on everyone’s machine instead.

The only challenge to getting an updated file out to people is that it needs to replace the existing one, and that is under “Program files” which is not accessible to normal users. If your users are running with local admin rights then you will have no problem with this (although you probably have much bigger problems such as malware to worry about). The easiest solution would normally be to put the file in a share which is available to “authenticated users” to read, and then to include an appropriate line in a machine startup script (applied via group policy most likely) to copy the file down (use xcopy / robocopy so you only copy the file once, not every time the machine starts up). Don’t forget that the file must be called “outlook.hol” for it to be recognised and used by Outlook when users add holidays through the GUI.

If you clone machines as a method of deploying new workstations, make sure the corrected file goes into your “gold” build; if you use other deployment tools or scripts make sure it is included as part of that process.

Note that if Microsoft do issue a service pack, this might overwrite your file with their version (which may or may not be correct), or it might deliberately avoid doing so (this was the case with holiday updates issued for Outlook 2003 for example) and you might miss out on other fixes that you did not know about.

Corrected files and additions available for download

Major fixes

If you don’t particularly want to bother editing the file yourself, I have done most of the hard work for you and fixed all the problems discussed in this article, for all 23 affected countries. I have also extended the dates out to 2035 (for the United Kingdom) for Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year, added Scotland as a country, and thrown in a bonus of dates for System Administrator Appreciation Day (as a separate optional “country” to add).

You may find that the links below appear to fail with a 404 if you just click on them, so you probably need to do a right click > Save Target As (or Save Link As, or whatever terminology your chosen browser uses) then choose where to save the file you want. If this does not seem to work with your browser (Firefox seems fine but IE is giving me grief), try the second link to download it as a .txt file and then change the filename to drop the extension.

Download a fixed version of outlook.hol holidays file

Download a fixed version of outlook.hol holidays file with a .txt extension

Alternative files

Rather than replace the entire file, you might want to just add in the corrected UK dates (and ignore the incorrect ones or manually delete these from your calendar). For this you want the UK additions file which has extra years, lieu days, Scottish holidays and SysAdmin Day (three separate countries so you can add what you want).

There is also a corrected, updated complete version of the dates for the UK mainland only, not Northern Ireland additional holidays.

I have also created a file designed for UK users who also want to be able to add holidays for Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Hungary and Poland without duplication of all the ones which are repeated in all those countries such as Christmas and Easter (yes, I had a specific reason to choose those countries for a client of mine).

You can download a zip file containing all 4 of the above, which might also help with problems some people have had in getting these to save.

Of course, you may not want any of these particular alternatives, but they may give you a useful starting point for ideas and a basis to start copying and pasting from – just remember to make sure the number of entries for a country is correct to avoid any problems.

Outlook 2010 holiday Errors in detail

The errors described briefly above are covered below, including the two different Easter Monday problems, and in most cases I have included my suggested additions if you want to correct your own files, or of course you can simply use my ready-made files with these changes already embedded.

Easter Monday on the same repeated date of 13th April

Despite the obvious rule that Easter Monday is on the day after Easter Sunday this was incorrect in many cases for the UK. 13th April was the correct date for 2009 and will be again in 2020, but the file lists this as the date for 2013 to 2019 as well, despite this not even being a Monday in those years and they got Easter Sunday correct in every case. The fact that they are correct up to 2012 is almost certainly because that was the last year included in the outlook.hol file for Outlook 2007, so someone obviously started from that base and added a bunch of new dates but forgot to change them for each year.

This error is repeated for 6 countries: Andorra, Australia, Ireland, Luxembourg, Slovak Republic and United Kingdom.

The correct dates for Easter Monday from 2013 to 2020 should be those shown below but this is a replacement rather than an addition, so no net difference in number of entries:

Easter Monday,2013/4/1
Easter Monday,2014/4/21
Easter Monday,2015/4/6
Easter Monday,2016/3/28
Easter Monday,2017/4/17
Easter Monday,2018/4/2
Easter Monday,2019/4/22
Easter Monday,2020/4/13

Easter Monday on the same date as Easter Sunday

As if that was not enough, for 17 other countries, for all the years from 2013 to 2020 Easter Monday is shown as the same date as Easter Sunday. Yes, you can have twice as many Easter eggs but you have to go to work on Monday morning! Again, dates up to 2012 are fine.

The 17 countries where this version of the Easter Monday problem exists are: Austria, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand (odd that this has a different issue from Australia, I think), Norway, Poland, San Marino, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland.

The correct dates are the same as those given above.

Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s day falling on weekends

OK, strictly speaking the dates for these don’t change so the file is not incorrect in one sense, but since it is a feature to add holidays to my calendar, it is useless if it does not actually achieve that objective. In the UK when these kind of fixed-date holidays fall on a weekend, we get a day in lieu in the following week to make up for it (so the Monday or as is the case this year, both Monday and  Tuesday as both dates are at the weekend). I know that in some other countries they don’t apply this kind of rule for all holidays (for example in Germany if a Saint’s day is on the weekend you simply miss out), and in others they take the nearer date (ie. Friday for Saturday, Monday for Sunday). Either way these ought to have been included for several countries and they are not.

So, if we leave the original dates in place, the 24 additional holidays as days “in lieu” from 2009 to 2035 would be:

Christmas Day (lieu day),2010/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2011/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2016/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2021/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2022/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2027/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2032/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2033/12/27
Boxing Day (lieu day),2009/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2010/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2015/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2020/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2021/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2026/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2027/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2032/12/28
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2011/1/3
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2012/1/2
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2017/1/2
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2022/1/3
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2023/1/2
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2028/1/3
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2033/1/3
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2034/1/2

Incidentally, there are probably other holidays which should also have an extra day added in a similar way. Australia Day for example is celebrated on 26th January, but when that is at the weekend it seems to be common practice to have an extra “Australia Day (observance)” in the calendar, but I can’t find a definitive reference to what the rule is (nearest day, following week, or some arbitrary government decision). If you have any specific examples of this kind of thing I’d love to hear from you in the comments, ideally with citations.

No Scottish holidays

There are two main differences for Scottish holidays from the rest of the UK:

• In Scotland they party even harder at New Year, so they need two days to get over it, and when it is a weekend as well they add their usual level of indulgence on top so they also need an extra day in lieu when the 2nd January falls on a weekend
• The August Bank Holiday which is seen by many Brits as signalling the end of summer and the onset of cold wet weather does not make sense in Scotland (I’m not sure if this is because it is always cold and wet up there, or because the change comes earlier), so they have their August holiday on the first Monday of that month rather than the last.

Since Microsoft have managed to include Northern Ireland holidays along with the UK but totally omitted Scotland, I have added Scotland as a country in its own right in my fixed files so you can choose to include these or not, in addition to the rest of the UK. The “2nd January Holiday” is shown on the day it is observed, rather than always on the 2nd (it seemed a bit redundant to label the 2nd January as “2nd January” and then have a lieu day as well). You could of course take this idea further and have a section for all the Scots holidays including those also celebrated south of the border but without any of the Sassenach-only ones such as Late August.

The additional section for Scotland might look like the example below, with 54 entries in total if you include dates up to 2035 as I have done in the downloadable files linked here.

[Scotland] 54
2nd January Holiday,2009/1/2
2nd January Holiday,2010/1/4
2nd January Holiday,2011/1/4
2nd January Holiday,2012/1/3
… …
Summer Bank Holiday,2033/8/1
Summer Bank Holiday,2034/8/7
Summer Bank Holiday,2035/8/6

UK Spring Bank Holiday 2012 and Royal Wedding 2011

In the UK we have two national holidays in May – the May Bank Holiday on the first Monday of the month, and the Spring Bank Holiday on the last Monday. The outlook.hol file follows this pattern correctly, and this would be fine except for a spanner thrown into the works because of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012. Firstly we get an extra holiday overlooked by the team at Microsoft on 5th June 2012, and secondly the end of May holiday has been moved to 4th June to act as a “bridging day” and give us a four day weekend. I can forgive people outside the UK for not knowing this (or frankly my dear for not giving a damn). I had no idea until I was looking at school holidays, and from the dozen or so people I mentioned this to since, none had any idea this was happening.

So, we need to add two dates to the holiday file, and I would suggest you should also explicitly include the non-Bank holiday so that it is clear to people who might otherwise assume it is just missed out and add it for themselves and take the wrong day off. In my amended files I have taken out the wrong one and replaced it with the explicit NOT shown below, so the net difference is two additions. The three added dates are:

NOT a Bank Holiday see 4th June,2012/5/28
Spring Bank Holiday,2012/6/4
Queen’s Diamond Jubilee,2012/6/5

We also need to add another extra one for the public holiday we have been granted to help us celebrate the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton:

Royal Wedding,2011/4/29

Addition information and references

The Bank Holiday dates for the UK and Scotland (for the next few years at least) can be confirmed at the official UK.gov page here: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensandrights/LivingintheUK/DG_073741 (=http://tinyurl.com/5kdoa4)

*About that support ticket: because I am an MCT I get two free support tickets with Microsoft. I had to use one of them as the only way I could make them aware of the problem as an official bug report, rather than risk losing it in the noise of the support forums. If I had been a regular customer who would have had to pay to do this I think I might not have bothered.

Finally Microsoft have released a client installation package with a recent rollup already included in the package (“slipstreamed”). Unfortunately, nearly 4 weeks after the release of update rollup 11 it is only rollup 10 that is included. While this is a move forward from the rollup 7 client that was available, it still means that most people are going to need to install the client and then immediately apply a patch to UR11, so it is probably of limited help really. Thanks but no thanks.

Get the new CRM 4.0 client for Outlook with Update Rollup 10 if you are using the on-premise or partner-hosted (“service provider”) versions of CRM. If you are using CRM online you are stuck with installing the original version of the special online client and patching it yourself. Note: CRM on-demand from Microsoft is only available in the US and Canada despite the announcement back in April about worldwide release, because it seems that will only be for the next release, version 5 available later this year.

Hat tip to The CRM Business for the original heads-up on this one.

In a recent blog post, Mark explains in great detail the file copy process in Vista, why it changed radically from XP and how this impacted real and perceived performance of this basic function. He goes on to explain how some of this has been changed and remedied in Vista Service Pack 1. He makes it clear that some of the code design choices have to be compromises between making things faster in different situations, and that in most cases Vista <> Server 2008 filecopying will be faster using the chosen algorithms than they would be with different choices, or using XP or server 2003 for example.

Copying a file seems like a relatively straightforward operation: open the source file, create the destination, and then read from the source and write to the destination. In reality, however, the performance of copying files is measured along the dimensions of accurate progress indication, CPU usage, memory usage, and throughput. In general, optimizing one area causes degradation in others. Further, there is semantic information not available to copy engines that could help them make better tradeoffs. For example, if they knew that you weren’t planning on accessing the target of the copy operation they could avoid caching the file’s data in memory, but if it knew that the file was going to be immediately consumed by another application, or in the case of a file server, client systems sharing the files, it would aggressively cache the data on the destination system.

The article is also a useful working example of how Process Monitor can help you to see what your machine is really up to. On the same subject, Mark gave a great Tech Ed presentation in Barcelona with some real-world demonstrations of how to use a variety of Sysinternals tools and utilities to detect, find and fix all sorts of system issues. A video of that talk entitled “The Case of the Unexplained…Live!” can be viewed here (it’s just over an hour long).

• You use WSUS to manage updates in your organization.
• You have Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2)-based computers or Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1)-based computers that have Internet Explorer 6 installed.
• You have configured WSUS to auto-approve Update Rollups for installation (this is not the default configuration)

If for some reason you do not want to install Internet Explorer 7 (such as it causes problems with an intranet or extranet application) then you need to take some remedial action to prevent this installation from taking place. Read on to find out how to check if this will happen and stop it if this is not what you want.

As described in Microsoft KB article 946202:

If you have configured WSUS to automatically approve Update Rollups for installation, but you do not want to automatically install Windows Internet Explorer 7 via WSUS when it is released on February 12, 2008, you will need to disable this auto-approval rule before February 12, 2008. Once the rule is disabled, you can synchronize the Windows Internet Explorer 7 package to your WSUS server by using the steps outlined below. Once the Windows Internet Explorer 7 package has been synchronized to the server, it will not be automatically approved when you switch your auto-approval rule back on. The steps that are described below are for the WSUS 3.0 UI. Steps for the WSUS 2 SP1 UI are similar, but the steps use the older Web UI.

Action to Take Before February 12, 2008

These steps will temporarily modify the auto-approval that you may have created to ensure that packages classified as Update Rollups are not automatically approved for installation. These steps are the steps for WSUS 3.0. For WSUS 2.0 please refer to the product documentation.

1. Click Start, click Administrative Tools, and then click Microsoft Windows Server Update Services 3.0.

2. Expand ComputerName, and then click Options.

3. Click Automatic Approvals.

4. Click the rule that automatically approves an update that is classified as Update Rollup, and then click Edit.
Note The properties for this rule will resemble the following:

• When an update is in Update Rollups
• Approve the update for all computers

5. Click the Update Rollups property under the Step 2: Edit the properties (click an underlined value) section.

6. Clear the Update Rollup check box, and then click OK.

7. Click OK to close the Automatic Approvals dialog box.

Note If you do not see a rule that resembles step 4, you have not configured WSUS to automatically approve Update Rollups for installation. Therefore, no further action is required.

Actions to Take After February 12, 2008

The steps above ensure Windows Internet Explorer 7 is not automatically approved for installation. In the following steps, you will manually synchronize the new Windows Internet Explorer 7 package to your WSUS server so that when you re-enable auto-approval for Update Rollups it will not be installed. These steps are the steps for WSUS 3.0. For WSUS 2.0 please refer to the product documentation.

1. Click Start, click Administrative Tools, and then click Microsoft Windows Server Update Services 3.0.

2. Expand ComputerName, and then click Synchronizations.

3. Click Synchronize Now.

4. Expand ComputerName, expand Updates, and then click All Updates.

5. Choose Unapproved in the Approval dropdown.

6. Ensure that Windows Internet Explorer 7 is listed as an unapproved update.
Note There may be multiple updates listed depending on the language and operating system updates you imported.

For most people, this will be a non-issue – maybe you don’t use WSUS (home users and small businesses typically use Windows Update, large enterprises more likely to use SMS or SCCM); or your WSUS configuration does not auto-approve update rollups; or the new version will install and give you a better and more secure browser without any problems with sites that you use.