Small Business Customer Manager

MrKristoff · 29th October 2003

I have the Small Business Customer Manager (that came with Microsoft Office 2000 Disc 2) installed on my system. However, for my office suite, I am using Microsoft Office XP Professional. When I am in the SBCM and attempt to use any of the Microsoft Outlook tools, I get the following error:

"Outlook must be installed and configured to complete this operation. Please run Outlook once to finish its configuration and try again."

I have installed the Microsoft Patch sbtupd.exe which is supposed to correct this issue, yet it still does not work. Any ideas?

Any help is much appreciated.

Newt · 29th October 2003

If you run NT4/2K/XP then take a look in the event logs to see if there are errors that will help troubleshoot this.

Otherwise I'd try removing the patch then removing the Small Business tools and reloading first the tool(s), and then the patch followed by a repair of Office XP.

If nothing helps, try opening a support call with Microsoft because this is so specific and deals with a bug they know about and the techs may have other things for you to try that simply aren't published. Should be a free support case for something like this.

MrKristoff · 30th October 2003

I contacted Microsoft. Initially, they wanted to charge me $35 for the support call, but when I asked why should I pay for a problem that exists solely between two of their own software applications through no fault of my own or my hardware, the customer service rep decided to "do me a favor just this one time" and "allow" me to talk to a technical support rep. Gee, thanks. After being on the phone with the supposed "techie" for over an hour (spent more time on hold than I did talking to him while he asked everyone else in the area about a potential solution) the best solution he could come up with is uninstall everything and reinstall the SBCM, then Office XP, then the patch. So, I guess that will be my next troubleshooting step. He wanted me to call him back with the results (which I suspect will yield no positive results as this is how I installed everything the first time) and if unsuccessful, he will refer this issue to their research team. So, perhaps they will come up with another patch, or just blow me off and tell me to go out and buy Office 2003 which has the "new & improved" Small Business Tools integrated (this was the "techie's" first solution to my problem, by the way). Thanks for the response. If the research team does come up with anything, I will post the results here for anyone else who may encounter the same or a similar issue.

Newt · 30th October 2003

Please do post your results - good or bad - here. Always nice to keep track of how M$ is doing with problems.

It's been several years since I've dealt with them but I had good results from their tech support.