Versioning in Outlook 2003

I spotted a weird thing today. Installing a bunch of patches for Outlook 2003, and magically without actually installing Office 2003 SP 3, I ended up with Outlook reporting it was SP 3…..

First of all I checked what everything is about on the following link :

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/821549

When I started out, Outlook reported 11.0.6568.6568. This is Outlook 2003 SP 2. All is good.

There is then a bunch of different Office fixes that I wanted to install :

949044
943985
943983
945432
947355
943973
943649
946254
945185

It seems that the following happens :

Then Outlook 2003 Service Pack 2 – version info says 11.0.6568.6568 – SP 2
Installed 945432 – version info says 11.0.8206.6568 – SP 2
Installed 949044 – no change
Installed 943985 – no change
Installed 943983 – no change
Installed 947355 – version info says11.0.8206.8202 – SP 3

How very odd.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms08-015.mspx is 945432, and changes the version in Help -> About to 11.0.8206.6568. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms08-016.mspx is 947355, and change sthe version in Help -> About to 11.0.8206.8202 … and it then says Service Pack 3.

With Enterprise Vault, Outlook 2003 SP 3 currently isn’t supported on the server, and the EV Deployment Scanner will complain if it detects it.

Altering PST Chunk Size

So I couldn’t find anywhere where this was documented, but I had heard that you could.  What happens when doing a client side PST migration is that the PST is chunked down in to 10 Mb chunks, by default.  This is controlled through a setting in web.config, in your \Program Files\Enterprise Vault\WebApp folder.

By default we see :

<configuration>
<system.web>
<compilation debug=”true” />
<trace enabled=”true” />
<identity impersonate=”true”/>
<!–
See http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;323246#7
httpRuntime Attributes:
executionTimeout=”[seconds]” – time in seconds before request is automatically timed out
maxRequestLength=”[KBytes]” – KBytes size of maximum request length to accept
useFullyQualifiedRedirectUrl=”[true|false]” – Fully qualifiy the URL for client redirects
minFreeThreads=”[count]” – minimum number of free thread to allow execution of new requests
minLocalRequestFreeThreads=”[count]” – minimum number of free thread to allow execution of new local requests
appRequestQueueLimit=”[count]” – maximum number of requests queued for the application
enableKernelOutputCache=”[true|false]” – enable the http.sys cache on IIS6 and higher – default is true
enableVersionHeader=”[true|false]” – outputs X-AspNet-Version header with each request
–>
<httpRuntime executionTimeout=”90″ maxRequestLength=”10000″ useFullyQualifiedRedirectUrl=”false” minFreeThreads=”8″ minLocalRequestFreeThreads=”4″ appRequestQueueLimit=”100″ enableVersionHeader=”true” />
</system.web>
</configuration>

The setting is maxRequestLength.

If you change it to say 2500, and restart the EV server (perhaps just IIS, I didn’t test that) then you will see much smaller chunks being sent to the server from the client.  I would think that this might be handy on clients where the network connection to the server isn’t very good/fast.