Ofiice 2007, Outlook 2003 and the MAPi32.DLL battle

A week ago i raved about the new Office Ultimate 2007 version in my office. In spite of the organization possessing the license for nearly 1 year, none had it on their machines. I was the proud owner of the first copy of the entire suite of Office 2007 with its latest software tools. I flaunted its features through my works on and off, especially with the new One Note 2007 drawing seamless pictures and tables with clean organization of data and a pleasurable experience to use. I simply ignored the product key pop-ups since our licensed one didn't seem to work, and every time it came up (now a regular visitor on my desktop nearly 5 times a day!), it was a spam on my nerve!
Until yesterday - the spam was no longer an unwelcome intruder - it suddenly morphed into an scary Vader type villain invading my entire Office 2007 suite and locking all the functions of the Office 2007 software. i was helpless! And was more importantly stuck with knowledge i could only see, but not touch, feel or play around with - it was lifeless!!

After much trying, pleading and battling with Office 2007, i gave up. To its predecessor. Office 2003. Microsoft assures you that there is no backward compatibility of OneNote 2007 files in OneNote 2003. Then came another problem once Office 2003 was installed. While opening Outlook 2003, this error occurred: mapi32.dll file is corrupt or it's the wrong version. My team mate from systems struggled for nearly an hour uninstalling and installing Outlook 2003 version, but to no avail. A 5 min search for the solution on Google yielded this:-

OL2000: ErrMsg: MAPI32.DLL is Corrupt or the Wrong Version

and the resolution for this is:-

1.	Quit Outlook.
2.	Click Start, point to Find, and then click Files or Folders.
3.	Type Mapi32.dll in the Named box.
4.	In Look In, click to select My Computer, and click Find Now.
5.	Right-click to select Mapi32.dll in the search results list.
6.	Click Rename, type Mapi32.old, and press ENTER to accept the name change. If there are multiple copies of Mapi32.dll in the list, rename each.
7.	Close the Find Files window and start Outlook.

there's one more step, however, which my systems' person performed, which is the critical factor. He renamed another file names MSAPI.dll to .old, and then Outlook 2003 started working.

time spent earlier: 1 hr
time spent to resolve after searching: 5 mins

what more to say? Search before you research!!

KnowMore: Rants

A rant or harangue is a speech or text that does not present a well-researched and calm argument; rather, it is typically an attack on an idea, a person or an institution, and very often lacks proven claims. Such attacks are usually personal attacks. Compare with a dialectic.

In some cases, rants are based on facts and concrete information, but the key ideas expressed are what the individual personally feels.

However, some rants are used not to attack something, but to defend an individual, idea or organization. Rants of this type generally occur after the subject has been attacked by another individual or group.

To rave" about someone or something was to be extremely enthusiastic. (This usage differed from an earlier meaning of the word that meant to rant.)

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rant

KnowMore: Turnkey

Turnkey

This term may be used to advertise the sale of an established business, including all the equipment necessary to run it, or by a business-to-business supplier providing complete packages for business start-up. A turnkey operation is one where fragments of a company's business venture or project is outsourced to third parties or vendors. It is often given to the best bidder in a procurement process.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnkey

The Elasticity between Marketing techniques

All the while I had interpreted ‘PUSH’ and ‘PULL’ quite differently. In the internal marketing context ‘Push’ meant to thrust processes and services down to the employees and ‘Pull’ meant to woo the employees’ confidence and pampering them, thereby winning their approvals. Yesterday I had learnt a new dimension of these two words. ‘Push’ meant that a company floated certain core offerings into the market. The uncertainty here is this: who is the market or what defines the market? A ‘pull’ meant that the market had to be studied to search for needs, immediate and latent, and the uncertainty revolved around the question: what will my business be?

Simply put, The ‘Push’ strategy of marketing has ‘business imperative’ as the focus, and like a rushing waterfall, the products/ services are ‘opened out’ to a selective market. Think of the ‘Pull’ strategy of marketing as a water pump where ‘customer needs/wants’ draw businesses to create products/services based on their needs. ‘Push’ is tilted towards the business offerings and ‘pull’ is tilted towards customer needs.

Again there is an elasticity even between these seemingly opposing thoughts. Sometimes businesses push their offerings, but if they find that the selected market isn’t receptive about certain portions of the offering, they ‘tweak’ the offering to suit their needs, thereby making possible an intrinsic ‘Pull’ within the ‘Push’ strategy. Some other times, the market needs are vast and varied and though products/service offerings are based on market demand, a generic variant of the service is offered to minimize costs and thus ‘pushed’ into the market. This is then an intrinsic ‘push’ within a ‘pull’ strategy.
Thus these two methods are similar to like-poles in a compressed magnetic field. Even when businesses begin, they witness the universality of such an elasticity not knowing what to begin with – what is wanted by whom or who wants what. Well, after all, we are still living with the chicken and egg problem, aren’t we?
The Elasticity between Marketing techniques