Office 2003 users locked out by Microsoft rights management mess

newsguy 0 775 Views

Oh dear, now I do not believe that was meant to happen. It appears that users of Office 2003 who also protect their documents with the Microsoft Rights Management Service (RMS) have found them so well protected that nobody can open them - not even the person who created the documents in the first place.

Microsoft came clean about the problem in a blog post which reveals that "Starting on December 11, 2009, customers using Office 2003 will not be able to open Office 2003 documents protected with the Rights Management Service (RMS) or save Office 2003 documents protected with RMS".

It appears that users were faced with the following error message when attempting to open RMS protected documents using Office 2003:

"Unexpected error occurred. Please try again later or contact your system administrator"

It has taken a few days but I am informed that a hotfix is now available from Microsoft to unlock those frozen documents. Better late than never, I guess. And the cause of the problem, well you'll love this - an information rights management certificate had expired.

Nice one Microsoft.

Dani AI

Generated

A short, practical follow‑up for anyone landing here later.

For affected Office 2003 installations the working recovery path was to apply Microsoft’s Office 2003 hotfix package (the Office client and the Word/Excel viewer updates were published as KB978551, KB978558 and KB978557) and to ensure Office 2003 Service Pack 3 was already installed. The vendor patches were not pushed automatically, so IT staff had to request or download the hotfixes and install them manually. Redmond Channel Partner · Computerworld.

Quick troubleshooting checklist

  • Confirm the files are RMS/AD RMS protected (protected files will have rights applied by your RMS system).
  • If possible, open the files on a newer Office build (Office 2007+), which was not affected, to retrieve an unprotected copy.
  • If Office 2003 must be used, install SP3, then obtain and apply the KB978551/KB978557/KB978558 fixes (contact Microsoft Support or use the Update Catalog). See the vendor writeups above for how the fixes were distributed.

Notes for admins and policy owners

  • This incident shows RMS is effective but requires certificate lifecycle management. Treat the Server Licensor/IRM certificates as operational assets: track expirations, automate renewal where supported, and test recovery procedures. Microsoft documentation on AD RMS certificate/enrollment and the ServerLicensorCertificate object explains the renewal and enrollment model. Also consider AD RMS client updates if clients need to handle expired content scenarios. AD RMS client issue · ServerLicensorCertificate doc.

On ’s point about ownership: rights management protects data but shifts part of ownership to the infrastructure operator (certificates, keys, templates). On ’s Stallman‑style concern: that tradeoff is why backups of unprotected originals and clear operational SLAs for RMS certificate management are essential.

Member Avatar for DigitaLink
DigitaLink 0 Newbie Poster

Which once again brings up the question when it comes to Office and Microsoft ... who owns your data? REALLY... still think it's YOU?

Member Avatar for alablabla23456
alablabla23456 0 Newbie Poster

Oh dear, what would Mr. Stallman think about this?!

By the way, registration by no means works, I have to invent new user names every time I want to post something here because I can't login with my old identities.

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