Tuesday, January 11, 2011

TIPS & TRICKS: Save As Popup for Outlook 2010

User got a new MacBook Pro on which I installed Bootcamp and Parallels. User boots into OS X, uses Parallels to start the Bootcamp partition of Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit. On that Windows 7 installation is Office 2010. In migrating over the user's almost 10GB worth of email data, I suggested we dump all of that archived email into Exchange. That's a lot of email data, I know. But, we had the space and figured we'd give it a go.

User opens up his PST files in Outlook 2010 and starts to move things into the Exchange area. After the first 1+ GB of data, he starts to get this window:



This annoying popup that came up every few minutes or so. Here are the things I tried:

- I checked to see if this would happen in another user's account on the same machine. It did not.

- I had him login to another machine to see if the problem would occur. It did not.

- I had him try just accepting the download for awhile. It did not stop.

- I created another Outlook profile to see if would continue. It did not.

- I tried to reinstall Outlook to see if it would stop the problem. It did not.

- I deleted his entire Windows user profile and created a new profile to see if it would stop the popups. It did not.

- Finally, I found this thread online: http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/outlooksend/thread/5bf5f5a4-e36b-48f0-a28c-eaa94518bbf2

Basically, the problem is probably a combination of one or more email messages in his account that is trying to interact with Microsoft's new Social Connector called People Pane. Since he didn't need this feature, I disabled it in Outlook > View > People Pane > Off. The popups all went away.

I guess it's one of those things where old data meets new software.