Resolved Strange MS Office 2010 / possibly Group Policy issue

I'm running a School MS Server 2008 32 bit Standard edition Domain Controller with a mix of XP Prow and Windows7 Pro clients. Everything is well patched including Office 2010 which has At least SP 1 applied.

On a number of HP clients (625 model laptops and Z200 workstations) I am experiencing a saves issue. This is only happening on these clients all other brands e have don't suffer the issue which is Staff and Admins can save work to their designated folders but students can't. Students can open existing work created on other clients and alter it but again saving fails.

Closing the programme brings up the offer of a save but the only option that works is to exit without saving.

Going to the Trust Centre and physically adding the student home folder makes no difference and saving to the C: drive or another share doesn't work either.

I am pretty convinced it has got to be something to do with the HP clients but for the life of me can't figure it out?

 

I was wrong about it being limited to HP Clients it's also now happening with some Windows 7 Lenovos.

Having explored our Group Policy a bit I can see on the Default Domain Policy there is no mention of any MS Office yet Staff users have no issues at all with saves. On the other hand we have a separate Student Policy where MS Office 2010 is specifically listed and in there is an Enabled Default Location for Word and it's currently set at

%HOMESHARE%%HOMEPATH%

Would I be right in thinking that by disabling this setting in the Student Policy will see them picking up their home folder just as Staff do without any Office specific GP?

 

Thanks Steve,

It's predominantly Windows 7 Clients. Only one XP machine seems to suffer the issuer and on that one it's a bit intermittent.

Tomorrow I'm going to disable that GP setting in the Student's OU and see if that has any effect.

This issue is driving me nuts!!

 

Intermittent fail to save student work in Word 2010

This is a question about an inability to save work when using MS Office 2010 and 2013.

I’m a "˜self taught’ Network Manager (have been in Schools ICT since 2004) in a Special School educating boys aged between 12 and 16 who have Emotional and Behavioural difficulties. Our maximum class size is 8 and the little fellows are often pretty keen to learn but easily distracted and confused. Hence the on-going problem we are having is causing me enormous grief!

We are running under a MS Select Agreement and have a MS Server 2008 Standard Domain with a mix of XP Pro 32 bit, Windows 7 32 bit and 64 bit clients. We are not running either Mandatory or Roaming profiles and the default profiles on the client machines are untouched.

Office 2003 and Office 2007 ran on the Domain perfectly. However, moving on from 2007 and running clean installs of Office 2010 has resulted in intermittent problems "“ particularly with the 2010 version of Word. Oddly those students affected with Word failing to save can save their work in Publisher.

Staff saves are not affected by the same issue.

I tried Office 2013 on a 64 bit Windows 7 client today and as per normal I was able to save as a member of staff but trying to save as a student was impossible.

Student Home Folder Permissions are correctly set as the Student Name and as Creator owner with appropriate settings. Most bizarrely this issue does not affect all the students all the time. I recently set up a batch of Windows 7, 64 bit clients with Office 2010 and today worked with two classes in that room. Again, some students had no issues yet others did and it did not seem anything specific to any computer.

Suggestions on where to look and what to do to resolve this hugely frustrating issue would be extremely welcome.

 

Thanks Arie. Never closed that one down because the problem persists.

 

This has come to notice again recently with a new set of Windows 7', 64 bit clients. I as previously mentioned cleared the group policy for Office 2010 as Staff saves are ok but it's the occasional student save in Word that continues to be a problem. A hugely frustrating problem. I'm seriously tempted to dump Office 2010 and revert to the much more user friendly Office 2007! Or shame on me dump MS altogether and go with the much easier to use and free for use Open Office.

 

An update - problem persists still can't save some student work in Word 201

Hi Fellow Windows BBS forum folk,

Re my ongoing Word failing to save issue.

I discovered that my network share containing the student home folders needed a permissions change - adding Creator Owner to the Student Group as is in the Staff Share but this hasn't resolved the issue.

The problem is still specific to the 2010 (and even worse 2013) version of MS Office and then just Word. All the other Office 2010 tools, Excel etc are not affected and staff accounts never have the issue. Which does, I suppose point toward it being a permissions thing but I'm no closer to finding an answer.

Seems odd that it's also a specific problem to our Domain, so it can only be a Group Policy or Permissions issue I suppose? But where do I need to look to resolve this. Oddly there was never a problem with the pre 2010 version of Word - which perhaps suggests a Trust Centre issue but if so how do I globally set it and why aren't Staff affected?

I'm loosing sleep over this one now!

 

Further Update:

Looking at the Group Policy specific to the Students (Staff do not have the same template imported) I see there are specific Office 2010 and more importantly, perhaps, Word 2010 settings which were all currently not active.

In User Configuration / Policies / Classic Administrative Templates / Microsoft Office 2010 / Security Settings / Trust Centres

I think this is all to do with Trust Centres - perhaps? In the Office 2010 I see that in Trust Centre 'Allow a mix of policy and user locations' is enabled. No actual locations are specified.

The same place for Word 2010 - nothing was configured - I have now ticked Enabled, purely to see if this makes any difference but as nothing is listed as configured I'm guessing I need to put something in there? Our set up is domain-dc1\users$\students\student year \ student folder

It didn't make any difference so I guess I need to define a path that is trusted - how would I globally set that so it applies to every student year folder?

 

Still got this issue with student users unable to save Word 2010 documents from Windows 7 clients on our Server 2008 domain. Staff users have no problem. Students have no problems with other Office 2010 components? Baffling me this is.

 

Resolved

This one IS Closed now because at last it's resolved. My good friend Kevin Carter a Server Genius at a company called CAPITA traced the problem as a permissions issue on Windows\Temp. The users didn't have any permissions set over the folder and hence when programmes that create a Temp file tried to write one there they couldn't do it. Changing that permission on each affected client machine has resolved this issue. A huge thank you to Kevin and hopefully if anyone else encounters a similar problem they will be able to search this excellent Forum and quickly find a solution.