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Microsoft OfficeOffice 2016System Administrator

FIX for “There was a problem sending the command to the program”

I encountered this error the other day and hadn’t seen it before:

When starting any office program by opening a file, the user saw: “There was a problem sending the command to the program.” Then when dragging the file to Excel, the file opened fine. What the heck?!

Turns out you have to turn off something called DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) in the settings. This Microsoft KB article details the problem.

Go to the Office app in question and go to the Options. From there, click on Advanced and make sure “”Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)” is UNCHECKED like below in my version of Excel 2016.

dde

Microsoft ExchangeOffice365PowershellSystem Administrator

Disable the Calendar on a User or Shared Mailbox In Exchange

This works for Office365 or an internal Exchange server to disable the calendar on a Shared Mailbox or User’s Mailbox. First, you’ll have to pull up the Exchange Management Shell. Then run the following commands:

New-OwaMailboxPolicy –Name “New Policy Name”

Creates a new mailbox policy


Set-OwaMailboxPolicy –Identity “New Policy Name” –CalendarEnabled $false

Sets the calendar for all mailboxes under the policy to be off

Set-CASMailbox –Identity “shared mailbox” –OwaMailboxPolicy “newpolicy”

Applies the policy to the mailbox in question

 

System Administrator

Enabling SMB1 or CIFS on Windows Server 2012

Ran into this this week. Even though I hate doing it and definitely don’t recommend it, I had to enable CIFS on a Server 2012 instance. To do this, you first have to install the “SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support” Feature, and then do the following:

Open the Registry Editor, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer and change the value of DependOnService from SamSS Srv2 to SamSS Srv.

Reboot the server and that’s it! Enjoy your legacy application / device!

Dell CommandPowershellSystem Administrator

Using Dell Command Configure to Enable TPM for Bitlocker

After configuring Wake On Lan via Command Configure in a previous post, I then wanted to enable Bitlocker on the Windows 8 machine. Unfortunately, the Dell laptop did not have TPM enabled in the BIOS, which allows for a secure key to be saved. Command Configure to the rescue!

There are a few commands you have to run. For some reason, Dell requires you to have a BIOS password to enable the TPM. Don’t worry, you can enable it and disable it all at once without needing to reboot the machine. Here is what you need to run:

cctk –setuppwd=biospassword        // This sets a BIOS password

cctk –tpm=on –valsetuppwd=biospassword         // This turns TPM on and provides the BIOS password you set previously

cctk –tpmactivation=activate –valsetuppwd=biospassword          // This activates TPM and provides the BIOS password you previously set

cctk –setuppwd= –valsetuppwd=biospassword          // This removes the BIOS password. Just put one space after the = sign. You need to feed the old BIOS password to make the change.

That is it! You’ll have to restart the computer and Windows will see the TPM device and be able to enable Bitlocker.