14 DAY TRIAL // Provided that users know what they’re doing and can easily identify and keep away from potentially dangerous links they can go ahead and disable the hyperlink warning messages in both Office 2010 and Office 2007. The warning messages are designed to act as an extra security mitigation, informing users of the risks that they face when clicking a link in the Outlook email client for example.
“In 2007 Office and in Office 2010, when you click a hyperlink or an object that links to an executable file, you receive the following warning message:
“Opening "path/filename". Hyperlinks can be harmful to your computer and data. To protect your computer, click only those hyperlinks from trusted sources. Do you want to continue?” the software giant said.
While the notifications do serve a purpose, the actual protection they offer is up to debate, especially since the warnings are provided indiscriminately for all links.
Those Office customers sick and tired of having to ignore the nagging of the productivity suite’s components whenever they click on a link can disable the warning messages altogether.
And Microsoft is making it extremely simple for them to do exactly that. The company has product a Fix It solution designed to automatically disable hyperlink warning messages in Office 2007 and 2010.
Customers need only visit KB 925757, scroll down a little bit and launch Microsoft Fix it 50681 (or they can do the same via the link in this article).
Those IT professionals that don’t feel comfortable trusting the Fix It automatic solution provided by the Redmond company can take matters into their own hands.
Microsoft has detailed the steps required for them to manually disable hyperlink warning messages in Office 2007 and 2010, as well as provide additional troubleshooting information that is sure to help admins.
Of course, for end users leveraging Office 2010 or Office 2007, the automatic Fix It solution is still the best choice, but I must emphasize, only in the context in which they trust themselves to do it.