Re: MS Office 2003 Customer Experience Feedback Program

• Previous message: Mark van Beijnen: "Re: MS Office 2003 Customer Experience Feedback Program"
• Maybe in reply to: Jeff Click: "MS Office 2003 Customer Experience Feedback Program"
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Date:         Fri, 24 Oct 2003 16:50:22 -0700
To: NTBUGTRAQ@LISTSERV.NTBUGTRAQ.COM

Jeff, thanks for the question about CEIP. I hope this will answer any
questions you may have.

CEIP can be disabled by policy or in the Custom Installation Wizard in
the Office Resource Kit.

To disable CEIP by policy, set the following registry value
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\Common:
DWORD:"QMEnable"
The value should be 0 (zero). This will force CEIP to be off for Office.
There will be no prompt to turn it on and this will override any setting
the user makes.

Using the Custom Installation Wizard
(http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/2003/default.htm):
On screen 10 of the wizard under the node "Microsoft Office 2003
(user)::Help::Help | Privacy Settings..." configure the setting for
"Enable Customer Experience Improvement Program" and be sure that it is
Unchecked. All installations done from the resulting image will have
CEIP turned off by default and the customer will not be prompted to turn
it on, though they may do so manually if they choose.

Given that you want to enforce that CEIP is off, policy is probably the
way to go for your situation.

In terms of what data we collect using CEIP, we are collecting anonymous
usage and stability information. The information collected is restricted
to information that will not reveal any Personally Identifiable
Information about the sender, nor do we allow the collection of
information that could compromise the anonymity of the sender. On our
servers, the information that comes up is aggregated together with CEIP
data from other customers, so that we are able to tell, for example,
what percentage of responding customers use the Mail merge feature in
Word, but nothing about who those customers are. We do not allow the
collection of strings using CEIP, so the data returned is limited to
numeric counts (e.g. number of clicks on the Print command), durations,
or specific values like the speed of the processor.

Data collected by CEIP falls into a few basic categories:
1. Reliability data - how often do crashes, errors or other bad
events occur? In what applications do they occur most frequently? Where
should we be devoting resources most heavily?

2. Performance data - How long do certain actions (boot, opening
files, etc.) take in the real world? Where do the performance
bottlenecks seem to be?

3. Usage data - How many customers click on a particular button?
Does anyone use a particular feature? Does anyone use the Journal in
Outlook? Mail Merge in Word? How frequently?

4. Configuration Data - How much memory do customer's machines
typically have? What version of the operating system is running? How
fast are customer's machines?

All of this data is used internally to help us make better decisions
about how the software is used and where it fails and succeeds, which in
turn helps us figure out where to devote resources.

I hope this information has helped. Please feel free to contact me if
you have further questions.

Ben Canning
Office Program Management
Microsoft Corp.

-----Original Message-----
From: Windows NTBugtraq Mailing List
[mailto:NTBUGTRAQ@LISTSERV.NTBUGTRAQ.COM] On Behalf Of Jeff Click
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2003 4:07 PM
To: NTBUGTRAQ@LISTSERV.NTBUGTRAQ.COM
Subject: MS Office 2003 Customer Experience Feedback Program

Russ,
Not sure if this is really appropriate for NTBUGTRAQ, since it applies
to Office 2003, but thought I would try anyway. We have been testing
out Office 2003 sub-components prior to making them available to our
users. One of the new "features" integrated into all sub-components is
the Customer Experience Feedback Program which when enabled will,
"collect anonymous information about your hardware configuration and how
you use [Microsoft's] software and services" and then send it off to
Microsoft. They are not very specific about the details. See
  http://www.microsoft.com/products/ceip/english/default.htm

It is not enabled by default and does not appear to send any information
until it is enabled. However, it still makes me nervous, since it is
not appropriate for our environment and many users may enable it. Does
anyone out there have better details on this buggar? Also, does anyone
know how it can be turned off via GPO or SMS, etc. (i.e. any idea where
the registry keys are for this setting)?

Any help would be most appreciated.

~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~
Jeff Click
ESD and ESM Quality Assurance
ESD (Electronic Software Distribution) Team Computing, Communications
and Networking - 2 Los Alamos National Laboratory

<jclick@lanl.gov>
(505) 667-4544

MS D433
TA-3, SM 463, Rm. 124
Los Alamos, NM 87545
~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~

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• Previous message: Mark van Beijnen: "Re: MS Office 2003 Customer Experience Feedback Program"
• Maybe in reply to: Jeff Click: "MS Office 2003 Customer Experience Feedback Program"
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