Microsoft Office locks users out of their own files
Some would say that Microsoft has been working hard to keep us separated from our data for years, but a new bug in their Office product is doing that very job that in an annoyingly real way.
A few users of one of the older versions of Microsoft Office have found that the documents to which they applied password protection are more than just protected. Instead, they appear to be locked inside that big steel door at Cheyenne Mountain and the data inside is completely inaccessible even to the users that created it. Microsoft issued a warning on Friday, saying that a problem with Office 2003 is not allowing users to access files that were protected using Microsoft’s Rights Management Service.
Once of Microsoft’s technical blogs (Office Sustained Engineering) issued an acknowledgment of the problem yesterday, including the following statements:
Starting on December 11, 2009, customers using Office 2003 will not be able to open Office 2003 documents protected with the Rights Management Service (RMS) or save Office 2003 documents protected with RMS. The following error message may be displayed when attempting to Open RMS Documents using Office 2003:
“Unexpected error occurred. Please try again later or contact your system administrator”
This symptom affects Office 2003 products used in conjunction with RMS, including Word 2003, Excel 2003, PowerPoint 2003, and Outlook 2003. It does not affect Office 2007.
We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we will provide customers a solution as soon as we can. Any new updates and we will post the information here.
This is, of course, not the first problem that Microsoft or its users have had with its digital Rights Management Services. It seemed to be particularly troublesome for a while in Vista, although not in regard to file locking such as is occurring now. It has especially been a headache for IT departments when things go wrong during management tasks. In fairness, all such systems are inherently prone to management problems.
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