Knowledge Base

Office 95, 97, 2000, and 2003 are not supported in a clustered environment

Article ID: 188984

Article Last Modified on 1/23/2007

Microsoft Office 2000 Standard Edition
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0
Microsoft Cluster Server 1.1
Microsoft Office 97 Professional Edition
Microsoft Office 95 Professional Edition
Microsoft Office 95 Standard Edition
Microsoft Office 97 Standard Edition
Microsoft Office Basic Edition 2003
Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003
Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003
Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003
Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2003

This article was previously published under Q188984

SUMMARY

Microsoft Cluster Server does not support the ability to fail over Microsoft Office products. These products are not cluster-aware, although it is possible to install Office into the shared small computer system interface (SCSI) drive they do not fail over correctly and are not supported as a failover application.

MORE INFORMATION

The commercially reasonable effort to make this work in a limited fashion on a Windows 95 client is to disable Osa.exe and Findfast.exe from the Startup group on the client computer. This lets the client quit the application and restart the application if need be. On a computer running Windows NT Workstation or Windows NT Server, you can quit the process by going to the Processes tab in Task Manager, and then by clicking End Process on the Osa.exe application.
For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

818212 How to use Office XP in a clustered server environment

Additional query words: reboot mscs w2000mscs osa exe server cluster

Keywords: kbinfo KB188984