MaplePrimes - answers and comments on Question, Maple worksheets and Microsoft Exchange Mail Servers

MS OWA

Axel Vogt — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:46:36 Z

We use that for home office, it even blocks Excel books in the
new xml format (which is the standard for Ecxel 2007).

However it blocks only the possiblity for downloading those
attachments (giving an info about that).

Just tried for a test sheet: it can be sent. Opening this mail
shows the attachment, but downloading through mouse klick does
only offer 'attachment.ashx' which seems to be almost empty
(it is 1 KB, can see nothing in it).

Note that this may depend on your browser (mine is Firefox, it
behaves different from IE for OWA and one needs lower security
setting for IE to work there).

As this OWA is only a kind of interface to my actual mailbox
I can access it as POP3 (using Thunderbird) and there it was
no problem at all to download, detach and run the test sheet.

another reason to use classic

Alex Smith — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:41:47 Z

Doug,

We have had a Microsoft exchange server for years, and have always had this problem with mw files.

For this reason, I use Classic in class even though I don't email files to students. This encourages students to do the same, and minimizes this problem somewhat. I warn them that if they use Standard, they will someday forget to zip the file before emailing it.

But it is a never ending nuisance.

compressed worksheets

acer — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:49:32 Z

It should be possible to change Maple's Standard GUI so that it will compress/decompress worksheets on the fly.

It would be preferable if such a change still allowed one to save worksheets as uncompressed XML.

Such files could have an extension such as .mwz. Hopefully that natural choice of filename extension hasn't been exclusively preempted.

acer

No response?

JacquesC — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:58:00 Z

While I understand that Maplesoft cannot respond to every thread -- luckily there is no such need, as evidenced by the wonderful answers provided by the community for most questions -- this one strikes me as different.

This post by Doug however is different. It is about a serious technological problem caused by a 'feature interaction' between a decision by Microsoft and another by Maplesoft. Since this is likely to afflict a lot of users, I am surprised that there isn't a standard response to this; even if there isn't one (yet), this thread should have caused such a response to be created, posted (likely on Maplesoft's main site for support-related matters) and then cross-posted here.

It has been a week, with nary a peep.

The problem

Tim Vrablik — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:40:39 Z

Unfortunately I think we know what the problem is: Outlook Web Access (OWA). We are aware that can corrupt certain types of attachments that are related to web content including XML documents which are essentially what Maple worksheets are. This may be related to the security features in OWA which help keep you safe. You can read more about it here:support.microsoft.com/kb/899394/

Regrettably this is beyond our control and there is nothing we can do about this. All we can suggest is that if you put your Maple worksheets in a .zip file and send them, it should work around the problem.

The joke

Axel Vogt — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:55:12 Z

I find it quite funny, that M$ introduces just that format as standard for Office application (Word, Excel), while they consider it as harmfull (at the server side) and do not even offer the possiblity to save such as attachment (as any reasonable software would do) - but at the same time it is trivial to circumvent all that through zipping files (which would never outwit protection SW at the server) ...