A bug, which cropped up on Friday (11/12), meant that users of Office 2003 were unable to access files protected using Microsoft’s rights management service (RMS) technology.
“The issue of the inability to open Office 2003 documents protected with RMS has now been resolved with a hotfix,” Microsoft said in a short statement on its Office sustained engineering blog.
Microsoft has said that the problem was due to an Office 2003 certificate that expired. “This resulted in Office 2003 customers not being able to open Office 2003 documents protected with the Active Directory Rights Management Service (AD RMS) or Rights Management Services (RMS),” a representative said, adding that Microsoft first learned of the issue on Thursday night and had the fix up by Mid-day Saturday.
“The original intent was to refresh and strengthen these certificates over time to keep up with newer technology,” the representative said. “We have not done a thorough post-mortem on this incident since we were very focused on fixing the problem. Looking ahead, we are exploring long-term solutions that will prevent something like this from happening again in the future.”
