Worksite Word Add-In Problems

The firm I work for uses Filesite as a DMS. We recently upgraded all the PC's to the newest version of it. This includes some add ons within MS Word.  Quickly after deployment we found an unforsean bug.  It has to deal with when a user brings open the open or save box from within word, then switches from one application to another. When the user comes back to the Word window, it appears to be in a non-responsive state. In reality the open/save box is sitting in the background, and holding all of Word hostage. We quickly informed our users of how to get around this, but still some people don't listen, or frankly don't understand. Autonomy knows about this issue and has a bug number for it.

The problem that comes from this is that many of our users have learned to go to task manager at any instant they see a program freeze. They kill Word, then relaunch it. The first prompt that comes up is an alert stating that the Worksite add-in caused the problem, and requests to disable it. Most of our users are also click happy, and click yes through it.  As soon as that happens it disable their ability to check in word documents, and save any word documents to the DMS.  I saw this happen several times a day. On top of this, the add-on requires administrative rights to enable it. So the fix is between 5 - 10 minutes because of the granting of admin rights, then log off and log back on.

I needed to stop this. So I eventually came accross a macro solution for another add-on. This was set to run every time you launched word. I thought this was a little accessive, and decided that every logon was good enough. Here is the general since of how to do it:

• Delete the key HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Resiliency\DisabledItems
• Then set the value SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins\WorkSiteOffice2007Addins.Connect\LoadBehavior is set to 3.

So I plug this into the login script. Now everytime someone runs into this problem I tell them to log off and log back on. Most of the time users don't notice the problem for a while so the fix will run before they ever notice.

I hope this helps someone, cause it took me a while to figure it out.  My manager and I equated this to between 17 to 18 hours of savings per year.