I’ve Made A Huge Mistake

For those that have installed Outlook 2007 Feb Update, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961752/ or have installed Office 2007 SP2, when you start up Outlook for the first time after the update, Outlook has to do some optimization on your mailbox. This can take some time, it took over 15 minutes for my mailbox though it is rather large (over 15,000 items). While it is doing this it displays a message “Preparing Outlook for first use”. This may confuse some people since they have already used Outlook before. A better way to say it may have been “Preparing Outlook for first use after SP2 was installed”. More importantly you can modify the text to whatever you want in this message, “Optimizing for Performance, Please Call Help Desk With Any Questions”.

How do we do this?

1.) Install the hotfix or SP2 for Office.

2.) Go to the registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Preferences and add a new string value called StoreUpgradeProgressTitle.

3.) In the value data box type whatever you want your message to be.

Pretty simple and a way to give you more control of what is being communicated to your end users.

Links

Outlook 2007 Feb Update http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961752/

Office 2007 SP2 Download http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/default.aspx

Original KB Article on Customizing http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969791