I had a very disappointing experience of dealing with Microsoft Dynamics support.

Last month, my client started deploying Meeting Room Manager. I first noticed that the customization on my PC stopped working and soon the problem spread to the citrix server.

The symptoms of the problem was that when I fired up a customized form in GP, it would complain of missing components. The components were Microsoft Listview control and Microsoft Date and Time Picker control.

We tried to fix the problem by reimporting the package but the import also failed.

I (not Microsoft) identified that the problem was due to Meeting Room Manager installing its mscomct2.ocx. Microsoft only allows 1 version of the ocx. So when Meeting Room Manager installed its version, it dumped the version that GP was using.

Microsoft Dynamics support then asked us to unregister and re-register the version that is found in c:\windows\system32. It registered successfully but the problem still persisted.

Microsoft Dynamics support said they were stumped and then they went into 7 days of ‘I am following up with my colleague in US’ , ‘I am in discussion with my colleague in US’ mode without any progress. They hinted that we should just rebuild the server and not waste time fixing the cause.

At this point, the users and I were very frustrated.

I updated the case with this:

GP is a Microsoft product, Meeting Room Manager is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner product. We purchased 1 and then the other and now we cannot get both to work together. Where did we misplace our confidence.

To which, this undynamic Dynamics support chap replied to the effect of:

‘GP was working fine. After Meeting Room Manager, GP does not work, so go after the Meeting Room Manager vendor, it’s not our problem. So there. Go rebuild your server and update us on outcome’

That was SHOCKING !! Both are Microsoft or Microsoft certifed products and they cannot work together and this chap said it was not their (Microsoft) problem !!

That chap could only see that it was not a Microsoft Dynamics GP problem and so it was not his problem.

Utterly fed up with his attitude, I did my own research on the issue.

The issue is actually not very complex.

mscomct2.ocx though registered successfully, was actually not registering the classes within correctly.

That was the issue.

So I focused on investigating how mscomct2.ocx was distributed.

I got a recently reformatted laptop and tried to add a Microsoft Date and Time Picker control on a VB form in Excel. It worked. I thought that the Meeting Room Manager messed up some operating system files.

I then did a Windows repair. But the problem still persisted.

Then I found out that mscomct2.ocx was previously distributed with Office XP Developer. So I downloaded the mcsomct2.cab file and unzipped its contents (mscomct2.inf, mscomct2.ocx).

I unregistered mscomct2.ocx.

I installed mscomct2.inf. That copied mscomct2.ocx to the system32 directory.

Then I registererd mscomct2.ocx and Voila !! Everything was working again !

There was no secret juice, just about 1 day’s research and trial and error. That’s much better than Microsoft Dynamic’s month long of ‘discussing with my colleague’, ‘following up with my colleague’ without any results !!