[AccessD] FW: Preparing Access Applications for Office 2003 Conversion

Polly R Peterson ppeters1 at cce.umn.edu
Wed Sep 1 13:18:34 CDT 2004


If any of you have experience/advice on this issue we would appreciate
your input.  Thanks in advance!
-Polly P.
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PROBLEM:
Converting from Office XP to Office 2003 raises security warning
messages in Access .ADP applications that are delivered to users via a
standard image. 


CONVERSION SECURITY ISSUE:
When testing our .adp applications in an Office 2003 test environment,
we find the following results:

*	When macro security is set to high applications basically do not
function.
*	When macro security is set to medium, a security warning appears
at startup: 

"This file may not be safe if it contains code that was intended to harm
your computer.  Do you want to open the file or cancel the operation?"  

If you select 'open' then the application appears to function normally

*	When macro security is set to low: Everything appears to
function normally.


OUR PROPOSED SOLUTION:
Microsoft recommends setting Macro Security to medium or high in Access
applications.  After reading several articles, I'm leaning toward the
following solution:
Set Access macro security to medium and disable the security warning.
>From what I've read, it's possible for an administrator to do this via
Certificate Server on Windows 2000/2003 Server.  The administrator could
create a digital signature that would be valid across the domain.   This
digital signature certificate would essentially turn off the error
message you see if macro security settings are at medium.


QUESTIONS
1.	How can we best adopt Microsoft's security recommendations and
avoid this error message?
2.    Does our solution seem sensible?  Has anyone actually done this
before?  Are their details I'm overlooking?  How have others dealt with
this conversion?
3.    Where can we see what security level we are currently using in
Access 2002?  The Tools, Macro, Security path isn't an option in 2002
and I can't find much on Macro security in that environment.



SPECS:
We're currently running Office XP, Access 2002, MS Jet 4.0 sp 8
(4.0.8618.0), Security Level: ?

We're Migrating to Office 2003, Access 2003, MS Jet 4.0 sp 8
(4.0.8618.0), Security Level Medium



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