How to completely stress your end users

I’m supporting one of our partners in filling out some forms for getting our software certified with Microsoft. Upon creating a user account on the designated site for that, we are presented with the following passwordrules:

Password Requirements: Contain 8 - 16 characters with both upper and lower case (e.g., a-z, A-Z). Have digits and punctuation/symbol characters as well as letters e.g., 0-9, !@#$%^&*()_+|~-=\`{}[]:";'<>?,./). One or more of the characters from the second (2) to sixth (6) positions must not be an alphabet character e.g. between A-Z or a-z.

Are the *COMPLETELY* insane? We have to read this 20 times to even begin to understand what is asked from us.

I love Microsoft, but this is crazy.

Bye,

Bart

Having Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 coexists next to each other

Update: it does look that Outlook 2010 touches the seperate profile after all, even without starting. First time the profile is created fine, subsequent launches of Outlook fail. So, maybe there is a reason for not allowing 2007 next to 2010. So, scratch all below :-(

When installing Office 2010 you get an message that Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007 don’t mix together. I subesequently removed Outlook 2007 as I had worked with Office 2010 before and with great pleasure.

However, for development purposes I had to install Office 2007 again. I noticed that Outlook 2007 installs fine.

I took a precaution to create a separate profile for both versions (starting Outlook 2007 with a command line switch /profile to select the correct profile).

So far, it looks like there isn’t a problem to be found. It might be that me having an Office 2010 64 bits version and a 32 bits Office 2007 version make them coexist. But, it looks like it runs fine, which I really like since the Microsoft CRM client doesn’t support the 64 bits version of Office.

Hope it helps anyone.

Bye,

Bart