Melissa. ILoveYou. Snow White. These are some of the biggest headaches that have confronted messaging administrators in the past year. Since most of these little nasties have been associated with Outlook, Microsoft has taken steps to slow the tide of worms from flooding the Internet.
In an ideal world, users would be cautious with the attachments they open and administrators would issue timely, easy-to-follow bulletins cautioning users of the latest threats. Unfortunately, we've seen that even users whom we thought were savvy have felt compelled to open attachments they later regretted.
Accordingly, Microsoft has now taken that control out of the hands of users by first implementing a patch and then building that patch into Service Release 1 (SR-1) of Office 2000, which blocks user access to the most dangerous—in some cases, also the most useful—types of attachments and severely impedes the way custom applications can utilize the Outlook Object Model, CDO, and even MAPI objects to engage Outlook features.
The initial reaction from many users has been one of dismay. Even Word's .doc files are blocked by this new patch, causing considerable aggravation for users who need to trade documents via e-mail in their daily work. Fortunately, Microsoft has made available a way to customize these security restrictions to ease them off your users (or increase them, if you must).
This 10-Minute Solution involves creating a special public folder, installing a new template form to that public folder, using that template to create items that will specify the security settings, and configuring your client machines to use those settings.
After installing Office 2000 SR-1 for all of your users, you now find that the new Outlook security features are strangling your office's productivity.
Use the Admin Pack from Microsoft to regain control over Outlook's functionality. This means installing the security template, configuring your clients, and configuring your security settings.
