Microsoft Office 2008 ID 502 Installation Issue

I installed Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac over the weekend and ran into some interesting issues.

ID 502 Installation Issue

When I read that Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac installed all its files as belonging to user ID 502, I thought it would only be a problem for enterprise users with multiple Macs on a network. It turns out that it has some side effects for a single Mac too. Installing Office 2008 from the DVD was mostly uneventful until near the end of the process when I was presented with multiple pop-up messages warning me about a keychain problem and asking for the administator password. This, of course, was because of the Office installer's ownership problem.

Here's what is going on. Mac OS X is descended from the UNIX operating system. Like UNIX, Mac OS X assigned a user ID to each account it creates. The first ID you create is assigned to ID number 501. The second is assigned to 502 and so on. You can see what ID your account is assigned to by opening up a Terminal window and typing the command "id" (without the quotes of course) on the command line. The first part of the user and group information it prints out is for the account attached to the owner of the current shell (which would be the account you logged into unless you changed it from the shell level using su or sudo). I opened up a Terminal window and used sudo to get to a root shell. Looking at /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2008/, I could see that all the installed files belonged to my daughter's account on the Mac (I'm 501 and she's 502). The group ID was correctly assigned to admin.

The Office for Mac Team Blog provides a detailed set of instructions to correct this problem in their blog entry...

Security issue in Mac Office 2008 Installer

The instructions there are really long command lines. So, don't forget about using shell completion (press the ESC key) to complete the long paths. If you are an experience UNIX shell user, you might want to consider

• sudo -u root -s
• cd {NAME OF APPROPRIATE FOLDER}
• Issue the chmod and chown commands individually to the contents of each folder. The -R option for the commands causes them to be recursively applied to every directory and file that you point it at.

Sync a Windows Mobile Smartphone?

Even before receiving my copy of Office 2008 for Mac, I had been toying with the idea of moving my Windows Mobile smartphone from its current Windows XP sync partner to Mac OS X and Entourage 2008. So, I contacted Mark/Space and asked whether their Missing Sync for Windows Mobile fully supported syncing with Entourage 2008. Here's the formal response.

Office 2008 requires that you first sync via Apple's Sync Services. In Entourage
you should be able to do this from the Preferences menu.

Since Sync Services does not recognize Entourage categories, all of your data will be consolidated into a single category called "Entourage".

It looks like it mostly does the job except for categories (which I use a lot in Contacts and Calendar on the smartphone). I'm thinking about taking advantage of their 14-day free trial period to test it with a test smartphone.

Entourage 2008

I never used Entourage 2004 (I generally use Thunderbird for email). So, the 2008 version is somewhat of a mystery to me except for its strong resemblance to Microsoft Outlook, for Microsoft Windows. However, I synced it with my Google Gmail (IMAP4) and Yahoo! Mail Plus (POP3) accounts to see how it handled massive amounts of email (my Yahoo! Mail has email going back to 2000). It seemed to deal with both account types without any trouble. Its aggressive junk mail filter mis-identified a lot of email as junk. But, that was relatively easy to correct. Entourage seems very, um, noisy though. It seems to beep at me a lot without indicating why it is beeping at me.

I'll be taking closer looks at the major Office 2008 components over the coming weeks and months. If you have any significant issues to point out or cool new features you think everyone should know about, post a comment here or send me email at: todd//AT//macsandstuff//DOT//com