Making SpeedFiler 2.0 Work With Outlook 2010
I have no love for Microsoft Outlook. In fact, Outlook perfectly represents everything that is wrong with the bloated Office Suite – it tries to do too much, and does none of it well. That being said, I still spend much of my working life in Outlook. It is one of a handful of applications that are ALWAYS running on my PC. In fact, I have an entire monitor that is dedicated almost exclusively to running Outlook.
One of the tools that has made Outlook bearable for me for the past few years is an add-in called SpeedFiler from Claritude Software. SpeedFiler basically does one thing: it helps you get stuff out of your inbox. I’m not going to do an ad for SpeedFiler here (you can read Scott Hanselman’s post if you want to get a feel for how it works) but it has absolutely become a critical tool in my never-ending quest for a tidy inbox.
So, I got a bit panicked when I discovered that SpeedFiler didn’t work with Outlook 2010. I was doing my semi-annual system rebuild this weekend and I usually take that opportunity to make sure that I’m running the latest-and-greatest of all my core applications. Since Office 2010 was recently released it seemed like a perfect time to upgrade from Office 2007.
The Office install went smoothly but when I went to install SpeedFiler I was greeted with the following:
Ugh! Outlook without SpeedFiler is a deal breaker for me. I was just about to go digging for my Office 2007 CD, but then it occurred to me: SpeedFiler couldn’t possibly know that it doesn’t work with Office 2010, it doesn’t even know that it exists. See SpeedFiler was last updated back in 2007. What if it actually does work with Office 2010, but just doesn’t know it yet. If I could trick it into at least installing itself, it may work just perfectly.
OK, so the first step is to try and understand how the SpeedFiler installer knows what products I have installed. Time to fire up Process Monitor (Quick side note: Mark Russinovich is a genius and all of the Sysinternals utilities are incredible). Among other things, Process Monitor allows you to see file system and registry access in real time. The volume of information that it reports can be a bit overwhelming, but if you learn to use the filtering feature it can be incredibly useful.
By running Process Monitor and then re-launching the SpeedFiler installer, I can see everything the installer is doing related to the file system and the registry.
Sure enough, the Process Monitor output shows clearly that SpeedFiler was looking for a couple of keys in the registry related to Office that were not present on my system:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\InstallRoot
and
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\InstallRoot
I’m thinking that the NAME NOT FOUND result coming back from those queries is the reason that the installation is halting.
Some quick digging through the registry showed that I definitely didn’t have either of the keys that the installer was looking for, but I did have something very similar under the 14.0 version of Office (I’m guessing that 14.0 is the version number for Office 2010).
I decided to re-create the Path value from the 14.0 branch of the tree in the 12.0 branch.
I manually created the Outlook and InstallRoot keys and added the Path string value pointing to my Office 2010 installation. I re-executed the SpeedFiler installer and it worked without error!
I launched Outlook and immediately saw that it was loading the SpeedFiler add-in. The UI integration with the Outlook ribbon isn’t that great (everything shows-up on the Add-Ins tab), but it doesn’t really matter because SpeedFiler is really all about the keyboard shortcuts.
All that matters is that it works – and it does. It works exactly like it did in Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007. Crisis averted.
Now for a few caveats. If you are running a 32-bit version of Windows, there is a very good chance that the registry key I showed above will be different on your system (note the inclusion of Wow6432Node as part of the path). You may want to run Process Monitor to see if a different key is used on 32-bit systems.
Also, if you are running the 64-bit version of Office, there is a good chance that none of this will work at all. Office itself now comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors and it may be tempting to install the 64-bit version to match your shiny, 64-bit OS, but you’ll likely find that none of your legacy add-ins will work. Since the add-ins run in the same process space as the application, you need to have 64-bit versions of your add-ins in order for them to run with the 64-bit version of Office. Unless you have really big spreadsheet needs, I’m not sure there’s any benefit to running the 64-bit version of office anyway, so it’s better to stick with the 32-bit version until the add-ins have time to catch-up.
2 Responses to “Making SpeedFiler 2.0 Work With Outlook 2010”
Hey
I’m also not a big fan of Outlook, but I also found a tool which make working with Outlook bearable! It is mainly a Outlook search, but you can also index your whole desktop! Maybe it is also something for you, for me it’s a big help!Oh it is called Lookeen: http://www.lookeen.net
Hi
very big thank you for that one! Made my day – and will keep me saving time
Greets!
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