unable to Mail Merge in managed environment

[Clint McIntosh]

We are managing all our OSX 10.2.6 machines via MCX (aka WGM) and
when any of the students or teachers try to do a mail merge with Office
v.X (10.1.3 updates) it fails. When they click on the button to Get data,
they can navigate through their files & folders and pick the excel
spreadsheet they have created and as soon as they click ok Open, they
get an error that says "Unable to open data source" and that's it. If I
perform the exact same task with the exact same files on an
unmanaged machine it works just fine. I have done chmod 777 on
the Microsoft Office X folder in /Applications and all the files & folders
within have full read & write permissions but the mail merge still fails
every time on the managed machines.
We have classes that depend on this function to work and the faculty
& students aren't too happy about this. Removing the machines from
being managed is not an option.
Can anyone tell me how to fix this??

Clint McIntosh -- (e-mail address removed)

 

[John McGhie [MVP]]

I can't tell you specifically how to fix it, but I can say this: Various
bits of Office EXPECT to be in the default Applications Folder on the boot
partition, and they EXPECT Word to be there too. If this is not the case,
you get the problems you are experiencing.

I understand that you can cure this by placing symbolic links in the default
folder structure on the boot partition. Aliases won't work, but SymLinks
will.

Hope this helps

We are managing all our OSX 10.2.6 machines via MCX (aka WGM) and
when any of the students or teachers try to do a mail merge with Office
v.X (10.1.3 updates) it fails. When they click on the button to Get data,
they can navigate through their files & folders and pick the excel
spreadsheet they have created and as soon as they click ok Open, they
get an error that says "Unable to open data source" and that's it. If I
perform the exact same task with the exact same files on an
unmanaged machine it works just fine. I have done chmod 777 on
the Microsoft Office X folder in /Applications and all the files & folders
within have full read & write permissions but the mail merge still fails
every time on the managed machines.
We have classes that depend on this function to work and the faculty
& students aren't too happy about this. Removing the machines from
being managed is not an option.
Can anyone tell me how to fix this??

Clint McIntosh -- (e-mail address removed)

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John McGhie, Microsoft MVP: Word for Macintosh and Word for Windows
Consultant Technical Writer <[email protected]>
+61 4 1209 1410; Sydney, Australia: GMT + 10 hrs