How to restore Outlook’s Advanced Find feature, disabled by the 9 January 2007 patch from Microsoft.
As we noted in Office Watch, Microsoft solution to a critical security gap in Outlook is to disable a feature in Outlook 2003, Outlook 2002 and Outlook 2000.
After you apply that important patch (which covers three critical Outlook lapses) you lose the Advanced Find save searches feature. Microsoft’s solution to their failure to secure the .oss (Outlook Saved Searches) file format is to turn it off entirely.
Once you’re applied the patch you can’t open or save .oss files. That might not be a problem if you don’t use .oss but for others will be an unexpected and unwanted downside to keeping Outlook up to date.
Microsoft seems to have made the financial decision that it’s not worth their time and money to fix a faulty feature – instead they’ve gone for the quick, cheap fix.
You may take the view that disabling .oss access is better than the risk of the a security breach, especially for an uncommonly used part of Outlook. Probably most network administrators will take that view.
But if you need .oss file access (and it’s very useful with Advanced Find) then here’s how to restore it. In short, you are undoing the action taken by the 9 January 2007 Outlook patch, but leaving the fixes for the other two critical problems intact.
Use Regedit to go this key:
