14 DAY TRIAL // Customers running an older release of the Office System found the past week that they were unable to open documents protected with the Rights Management Service. Microsoft first informed of the issue on December 11th, and has since then worked to produce a resolve for customers. According to the company, Office 2003 was unable to either open or save documents in the native Office 2003 file format which had been protected with RMS. This is no longer an issue, as Microsoft has released no less than three hotfixes addressing this specific problem.
“The issue of the inability to open Office 2003 documents protected with RMS has now been resolved with a hotfix. You can obtain the hotfix by using the following locations: Office Client – KB978551; Word Viewer – KB978558; Excel Viewer – KB978557,” revealed a member of the Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering Team.
It is important to note that the problem affects only components of Office 2003, and not later releases of the productivity suite, including the latest development milestone of Office 2010. In mid-November 2009, Microsoft releases the first Beta build of Office 2010.
“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,” a representative of the Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering Team added.
At this point in time, Office 2010 Beta Build 14.0.4536.1000 and activation product keys continue to be available from Microsoft. Office 2010 Beta Build 14.0.4536.1000 can be used for free until October 2010, at which point in time it is set to expire.