Thursday, July 10, 2014

Outlook 2011: Junk Mail Protection Greyed Out

According to this Microsoft KB, people using Outlook 2011 and Exchange 2013 are unable to access the tool-bar item "Junk e-mail protection" because the item is greyed out.


However, one of our clever system admins in Warsaw discovered that if you first open Outlook Preferences and then go to Tools in the menu bar, Junk E-mail Protection magically comes back.


I haven't done thorough testing but it appears that using this work-around does enable client-side Junk mail filtering configuration.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Attempting to enter a Windows Server product key returns "Unacceptable Character"

When attempting to activate a Windows 2008 R2 server we tried to type (and cut/paste) the license key and received an error "Unacceptable Character".  The fix was to enter the activation key through the command line:

slmgr.vbs -ipk [product code]

You can then activate the server with this command:

slmgr.vbs -ato