Black hole shares

[Dan Shearer]

> > Microsoft Office (and other Windows packages) wants to write to
> > ridiculous files that it has no reason to, system DLLs, its own .EXEs and 
> > the like. This is what makes it so very hard to run Office from a network 
> > server, NT or any other. There are ways, but they are all very nasty.
> 
> dan, we run microtoss office's word 97 at the cafe.  i copied the
> necessary files until it worked.  i _haven't_ registered the dlls, but the
> entire share is definitely read-only.

I suspect you haven't really, thoroughly tested the installation. For
teaching purposes just about every obscure and mostly useless feature has
to be working. So you can have a perfectly usable Word or Excel that has
problems in the CBT-type help files, or with running certain kinds of
macros, or linking/embedding with certain kinds of applications. I know it
sounds twisted, but for the teaching environment where I worked for so
long near enough isn't good enough. I've talked a bit with the Computer
Power Group training organisation here in Australia since I left the Uni
(big users of freeware, including Apache, Samba, Linux and lots more) have
kept this sort of research current. I am quite sure it is still the case
with Office 97 and I really doubt that anything much has changed with
Office 98. 

Dan