What to do if you’ve been locked out of Office 2003
Office 2003 contains a feature named Rights Management Service for protecting secure documents from unauthorized access and editing. And in the past few days that feature has proven much more secure than anyone wants.
The feature is used for networks running Windows Server and gives document creators fairly extensive control about who can access their documents and what they can do with them (right down to whether they can print them or pass them on, as well as more obvious tasks such as reading or editing.)
On Friday, users of the feature found themselves unable to save or open even those documents which they should have been able to open. To make things worse, staff in such a position were greeted with a message reading “Unexpected error occurred. Please try again later or contact your system administrator.” It seems safe to assume Friday was not a fun day to work in corporate IT departments.
The issue affects the main components of Office 2003 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Oulook) plus the viewers for Word and Excel. It doesn’t affect Office 2007, the latest edition of Microsoft’s office suite, which also features Rights Management Service.
Microsoft acknowledged the problem on Friday evening and has now issued a series of fixes (one for the Office applications and one for each of the viewers.) The fixes need Office 2003′s Service Pack 3 to be in place.
The firm hasn’t detailed what caused the problems, but PCWorld is reporting it was down to a security certificate used by the service expiring.
Clearly there’s never going to be a great time to experience a problem such as this, especially as it appears to be down to a simple blunder. That said, a corporate network issue with your software which arises on Friday afternoon which you have fixed before Monday morning is about as fortunate a piece of timing as it gets.
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