Thursday, May 17, 2007

Disabled Addins in Office

Many times the help desk will get a call from someone saying their addin is not installed. So you check in SMS and sure enough it is there. It would be nice if IT could know ahead of time if there are disabled addins so they can fix it.

If you have a disabled items in office you will find this key
----------------
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Office\11.0\\Access\\ResiliencyDisabledItems
----------------
Where 11.0 is the version number
Resiliency will only be there when an item is disabled.

The key might look something like this
----------------------
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Resiliency\DisabledItems]"12C71C2"=hex:02,00,00,00,a0,00,00,00,04,00,00,00,63,00,3a,00,5c,00,64,00,6f,\ 00,63,00,75,00,6d,00,65,00,6e,00,74,00,73,00,20,00,61,00,6e,00,64,00,20,00,\ 73,00,65,00,74,00,74,00,69,00,6e,00,67,00,73,00,5c,00,62,00,70,00,6f,00,6c,\ 00,61,00,73,00,65,00,6b,00,5c,00,61,00,70,00,70,00,6c,00,69,00,63,00,61,00,\ 74,00,69,00,6f,00,6e,00,20,00,64,00,61,00,74,00,61,00,5c,00,6d,00,69,00,63,\ 00,72,00,6f,00,73,00,6f,00,66,00,74,00,5c,00,77,00,6f,00,72,00,64,00,5c,00,\ 7e,00,77,00,72,00,61,00,30,00,30,00,30,00,30,00,2e,00,77,00,62,00,6b,00,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00
---------------------------

I am currently working on a MIF or MOF to collect the information. Because the DisabledItems key (12C71C2) is a dynamic name you can't easily make a MOF, well you can, but since you have several other reg keys you need to make putting them in a single group isn't easy or possible. I am no MOF expert but I am trying to find experts to let me know. The easiest way would be to create a VbScript that would search for the keys for the current use and create/modify a MIF file so it contains all the disable items for the current and previous users.

Once located you can create an advertisment that deletes the Resiliency key forcing the addin to load the next time. If you see the computer again after the next inventory then you know there is a real problem and to go fix it.

Soon I hope to have a simple MIF file available. I am still checking to see if MS uses it in Office 2007. If so then I might spend more time on making a good reporting tool.