We've had an issue where the CRM buttons were greyed out in Outlook 2010 and CRM 2011. The Outlook CRM addin was properly installed and enabled but when the user opened Outlook and selected the CRM tab, all CRM related buttons and actions are greyed out. This happened when Office 2013 (or later) component was installed on the user’s PC. Because there are shared components between versions, it created an incompatibility.

As a first step, check event viewer to see if there are any application errors that have been logged regarding the MSCRMAddin load behaviour.

There are a few OST to PST converters available around, most of them commercial products, with some being better than others. We won't list them here, because we haven't tried any. We have ran into a situation where we've had to get the emails from an OST file. The IT support client did not particularly care what format, as long as they were readable. We've used this free, open-source tool that allowed us to extract the emails in rtf and txt format, and extracted the related attachements.

The tool can be compiled from source here: https://github.com/libyal/libpff or you can download this compiled version.

Example usage: Output all emails in all formats from file.ost

pffexport.exe -f all -m all file.ost

Full details on application usage:

Q. I have 2 directories that I'm combining (eg: from 2 backups), some files are newer, some are older, butI only want to copy the missing files to the destination. How do I do that?

A. Robocopy has a few flags that are useful for ths situation:

There are many instances when programs are starting when the computer boots, bring annoying pop-ups and consuming resources. Most of them have a way to disable that feature, some of the more poorly designed ones do not. There's a way to disable it, using an configuration application called msconfig. It exists in all modern Windows versions:

Go to Startup Tab and uncheck any application you don’t want to launch during boot time. Click Apply and then OK.

We regularly share some of the scripts that our IT technicians and support staff puts together (or finds online), especially if we think it may be useful to someone. Below is an example of a windows script (batch) that replaces file names with spaces to underscores. (For example: "file name.txt" will be changed to "file_name.txt")

The script recursively goes through the directories and makes adjustments.

Q: We have switching our Exchange server to another one, but the autodiscover keeps reverting back to the old server. Is there a way to fix this?

A: You can manually bypass the Microsoft Exchange settings. (Below was tested on Exchange 2010 and 2013.)

Adjust the following registry settings. Depending on your version of Microsoft Office the number between "Office" and "Outlook" will change. For example, in Outlook 2007 it is 12.0, for Outlook 2010 it is 14.0, for Outlook 2016 it is 16.0:

On some occasions, when accessing an Remote Desktop Server that gives out licenses based on devices, you may get this error:

Error: The remote session was disconnected because the Remote Desktop client access license stored on this computer has been modified

You can fix this using the following steps:

If you need to manipulate (rename, move, etc) files in a windows batch, here are useful variables that can help with that: