Office 2004 and Windows 2003 Server Home Folder

[Gregory Pica]

Hello,

I have all my Mac users authenticate to a Windows 2003 Server and also store
their Home folder on that server. Office 2004 is installed on the local
computer. Each time an Office application is launched, it goes through what
appears to be the First Run process ­ Configuring Office Components and
Optimizing Font menu performance, etc. The users systems have read/write
privileges to all folders with Microsoft applications and files in them. Can
anyone shed some light as to what files Office is looking for that tells it
that it no longer needs to do what it¹s doing?

Thank You. Greg

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Hello,

I have all my Mac users authenticate to a Windows 2003 Server and also store
their Home folder on that server. Office 2004 is installed on the local
computer. Each time an Office application is launched, it goes through what
appears to be the First Run process – Configuring Office Components and
Optimizing Font menu performance, etc. The users systems have read/write
privileges to all folders with Microsoft applications and files in them. Can
anyone shed some light as to what files Office is looking for that tells it
that it no longer needs to do what it's doing?

That looks like a probolem reading the prefs and the font cache.
Either the prefs are corrupted, or Office has a hard time reading the
prefs from that type of setup.
Is the user folder properly located in the NetInfo database on the Mac
(I would guess so). You could also try to create a symlink in /Users for
the Home folder (pointing to the location on the server). That might
fool Office into believing that the user fodler is just in /Users and be
happy with it).

It could be an issue with the fact that the Home folder is not located
on an HFS partition. I don;t know whether these pref and cache files
have resources. If they do, that might be an issue out of a non-HFS
partition (though the ._ files should be properly created from a Tiger
machine).


Corentin

 

[Mickey Stevens]

I think that behavior is to be expected. If you use the applications on the
same computer in one session, you shouldn't see the extended initialization
time beyond the first launch, but if you log onto another machine afterward,
you'll see this behavior on the other machine, and again on any other
machines you use, including if you go back to the first machine. It's
because some files such as the Office Font Cache are rebuilt if you the
preference file (stored on the server) was created on another machine.