yet another microsoft flaw

I work for a large national company with offices and departments in most major and minor cities across Canada.

Office XP. Word. Buried deep within some settings tools options preferences sub pop up window is a tiny little check box, which by default is checked. This check box instructs Word to save backup files of the currently open document.

It became apparent at our tiny satellite office that this "feature" was commanding a large amount of file server space, which was not only unnecessary, but also triple and quadruple redundant, as the files are already backed up to an off site location.

Our IT guru instructed is to do a search for all the .wbk files and then delete them, after disabling the "feature".

Quite straight forward. However, one person at my office did a My Computer search instead of a My Documents search.

My Computer includes several (sometimes many) network drives. One of these mapped drives is available to every single user in the entire company.

The search done by the employee at my office of My Computer discovered hundreds of .wbk files on the network drive. Files of an obviously sensitive and confidential nature.

Sure, the files were only potentially available to people in the company and no where else, but the flaw of yet another Microsoft product is obvious: saving copies of files without prompting the user for a location or even permission.

Funny, yet potentially dangerous.

The problem has been resolved.

Get a real computer and a real OS and real applications that work: Apple.ca