[ms office - 2010] Intermittent fail to save student work when using MS Office 2010 and 2013.

[speckytecky]

I’m a ‘self taught’ - well perhaps better described as an Edugeek taught Network Manager (have been in Schools ICT since 2004) in a Special School educating boys aged between 12 and 16 who have Emotional and Behavioural difficulties. Our maximum class size is 8 and the little fellows are often pretty keen to learn but easily distracted and confused. Hence the on-going problem we are having is causing me enormous grief!

 

We are running under a MS Select Agreement and have a MS Server 2008 Standard Domain with a mix of XP Pro 32 bit, Windows 7 32 bit and 64 bit clients. We are not running either Mandatory or Roaming profiles and the default profiles on the client machines are untouched.

 

Office 2003 and Office 2007 ran on the Domain perfectly. However, moving on from 2007 and running clean installs of Office 2010 has resulted in intermittent problems – particularly with the 2010 version of Word. Oddly those students affected with Word failing to save can save their work in Publisher.

 

Staff saves are not affected by the same issue.

 

I tried Office 2013 on a 64 bit Windows 7 client today and as per normal I was able to save as a member of staff but trying to save as a student was impossible.

 

Student Home Folder Permissions are correctly set as the Student Name and as Creator owner with appropriate settings. Most bizarrely this issue does not affect all the students all the time. I recently set up a batch of Windows 7, 64 bit clients with Office 2010 and today worked with two classes in that room. Again, some students had no issues yet others did and it did not seem anything specific to any computer.

 

Suggestions on where to look and what to do to resolve this hugely frustrating issue would be extremely welcome.

[speckytecky]

Re my ongoing Word failing to save issue. Following a very useful suggestion from the wonderful Steve (new daddy) Hill of theEdugeek Parish I discovered that my network share containing the student home folders needed a permissions change - adding Creator Owner to the Student Group as is in the Staff Share but this hasn't resolved the issue.

 

 

The problem is still specific to the 2010 (and even worse 2013) version of MS Office and then just Word. All the other Office 2010 tools, Excel etc are not affected and staff accounts never have the issue. Which does, I suppose point toward it being a permissions thing but I'm no closer to finding an answer.

 

 

Seems odd that it's also a specific problem to our Domain, so it can only be a Group Policy or Permissions issue I suppose? But where do I need to look to resolve this. Oddly there was never a problem with the pre 2010 version of Word - which perhaps suggests a Trust Centre issue but if so how do I globally set it and why aren't Staff affected?

 

 

I'm loosing sleep over this one now!

[speckytecky]

Looking at the Group Policy specific to the Students (Staff do not have the same template imported) I see there are specific Office 2010 and more importantly, perhaps, Word 2010 settings which were all currently not active.

 

In User Configuration / Policies / Classic Administratine Templates / Microsoft Office 2010 / Security Settings / Trust Centres

I think this is all to do with Trust Centres - perhaps? In the Office 2010 I see that in Trust Centre 'Allow a mix of policy and user locations' is enabled. No actual locations are specified.

 

The same place for Word 2010 - nothing was configured - I have now ticked Enabled, purely to see if this makes any difference but as nothing is listed as configured I'm guessing I need to put something in there? Our set up is domain-dc1\users$\students\student year \ student folder

[jklight]

What are the permissions on the folder the students are saving to? What (if any) error message do they receive?

 

When we updated Office we had a problem because the permissions required changed (i think they needed "Write Attributes" or maybe it was "Write Extended Attributes") We really don't want the students to have this permission because it gives them the ability to "hide" files or folders and normally teachers don't have the "view hidden files" on so there is the problem.

 

Hope that helps.

[speckytecky]

No error messages - it just does nothing when they click on save or save as. Trying to close the programme brings up the save or cancell box but again save fails and clicking cancell twice eventually moves the student away from the programme.

 

I'm pretty convinced that this is a GPO trust centre setting problem but am not at all sure what path I need to set as a trusted location?

[jklight]

Maybe check out: Word 2010 and Excel 2010 will not save new documents nor save as any - Microsoft Community

[speckytecky]

Nope, thanks for the suggestion but it's not anything like that. Office is perfectly installed and up to date - hence no issues saving when logged on as a member of staff. It's definitely related to Group Policy and as far as I can tell - trust centres. I'm pretty sure I just need to work out what path to put into the GP setting?

[speckytecky]

Still got this flaming issue - clearly something to do with my domain as other users of Office 2010 on Server 2008 domains using Windows 7 clients don't have a problem with. Why every other component of Office 2010 works perfectly yet Word plays up is what's totally got me puzzled?

[SYNACK]

Have you looked at procmon to see where it is getting to before failing and are there any events in the main event logs or the per application ones.

[dhoward_westexetc]

File > Word Options > Advanced > Save - try the option 'Copy the remote file to your computer, and update the remote file when saving'.

 

Fixed a load of our woes with Word 2003, it's our standard setting now when we deployed Office 2010, and we have never had an issue.

[speckytecky]

This one is resolved - at last. With a huge thank you to Kevin Carter of CAPITA who traced the issue to a permissions issue. The students did not have any permissions on the Windows\temp folder. Setting them to full permissions and now the programmes that by default write to this folder by default work. What a relief. I'm still a bit puzzled over why the correct setting had not been picked up in the original set up though. Edited April 27, 2013 by speckytecky