Saving word Documents to a network ATT John McGhie - Good News??

[MacFan]

I have written several times about the problem of saving Word documents
to a network server under Mac OS 10.4.

I just downloaded the latest version of 10.4.3 and the problem appears
to be corrected.

Is that your read?

I really appreciate the advice and information that you provide to this
newsgroup.

Many thanks for yur continuing efforts.

RJS

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi RJS,

I don't know when John will get here but I believe I can answer this for
you.

No, OS 10.4.3 is not supposed to cure 'save to server' issues. In fact, if
you check the thread on this newsgroup called "Various File Save error
messages with Word 2004 and Tiger (10.4.2) Server", you'll see that another
poster is still experiencing the problem with 10.4.3

So if things are better for you, just consider yourself lucky and cross your
fingers!

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***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
MacOffice MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
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Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[MacFan]

Beth,

Thanks for your reply. For what it is worth I upgraded 16 iMacs this
morning and have tested them out using several accounts. Everything
seems to be acting as it should. I can save to the home account on the
network without any difficulty or without resorting to save the file in
rtf.

One interesting thing did occur on a few accounts. The Word program
crashed twice before it finally launched. But this was not consistant
and once it launched it appeared stable.

RJS

 

[Rob Daly [MSFT]]

I'm going to post this same information for every separate report of this
same issue that there is on the newsgroups. Hopefully, it will help at least
some of you:

The Problem:
Word is having various problems saving to remote home folder (henceforth RH,
RHF) shares from 10.4.x clients.

The larger problem:
Not everybody is having this issue and, of those who are, the problem
doesn't exhibit the same symptoms.

This one has been around for a while now and here at Microsoft we are still
working on pinning down the exact cause. Word File I/O code is incredibly
complex and that, combined with the configuration differences of remote home
folders, combined with the unknown change to RHF client code in 10.4.x makes
this a very tricky problem to provide a general fix for. I have been
personally working with many of the affected customers to try to identify
the cause and workarounds for this problem and while the cause remains
elusive, one of the following workarounds may be the one for you...

So far I can share these known workarounds. DISCLAIMER: NONE OF THESE MAY
WORK.

Workaround 1:
Check to ensure you haven't got two instances of the remote home folder
server mounted. Often, admins will have a logon script to mount the server
on the desktop to provide users easy access to directories other than their
home folder. This is bad as it causes Word to trip over a file lock problem
as it is working with duplicate paths to the same file. The workaround: Do
not remount the server, just create an alias to the root directory.

Workaround 2:
Change the user preference in Word to specify the exact path to the
documents folder. Go to Word: Preferences: File Locations. In the location
for document saving, navigate the path to the RH Documents folder. This has
fixed the issue for many customers, but again not for all.

Workaround 3:
Upgrade to 10.4.3. A small proportion of afflicted customers have been
reporting the issue's disappearance with 10.4.3. The worst that can happen
is that it doesn't work .

Workaround 4:
Turn off spotlight for OS partition. Read/Write operations may be getting
strangled by Spotlight especically when they are I/Oing over the wire to
disk space located on the RHF. This may help.

We are working on a better solution to this problem as a matter of highest
priority. As soon as I have any more information I will post it to this
newsgroup. MVPs or others, please feel free to cross-post this to wherever
it's needed or wherever I have missed.


--
Rob Daly
Macintosh Business Unit
Word Test

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