Customer Experience Improvement Program

A new feature of Microsoft Office 2003 is the Customer Experience Improvement Program. Microsoft uses this optional method to identify the usefulness of product features installed on a user’s computer by collecting data at specified checkpoints (determined by Microsoft and driven by received data). All data collected by the Customer Experience Improvement Program reporting process is anonymously gathered and reported to Microsoft.

This program helps determine which Office 2003 features are used—how often, how much, and by what percentage compared with other Office applications installed on the user’s computer. The resulting data helps Microsoft prioritize bug fixes by feature and product and determine whether a feature is used enough to be included in future releases of a product.

Note

By default, the Customer Experience Improvement Program prompts users to participate after two days of using any Office application. Administrators can disable the prompt by setting a policy. If the policy is not enabled, users can still choose not to participate when prompted.

Some features of Office are dependent on the data collection features of the Customer Experience Improvement Program. For example, users who choose to participate automatically receive updates of the new extended error messages. These error messages provide explanatory text about errors users encounter, as well as helpful links to further information on the Web that might suggest how to correct or avoid the error. Without participating in the Customer Experience Improvement Program, users do not receive these updates.

The Customer Experience Improvement Program (Help | Customer Feedback Options) is included with Office 2003 and is turned off by default. The following Windows registry setting controls whether it is enabled:

Subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common

Value entry: QMEnable

Value type: DWORD

Possible value data settings: [0 | 1]

Setting the QMEnable data value to 1 enables the program; setting it to 0 disables it. This setting is available as a policy in the Office 2003.adm policy template under Office 2003 | Help | Privacy Settings | Enable Customer Experience Improvement Program.

Even though the Customer Experience Improvement Program may be disabled in the registry, this setting only turns off the reporting feature; the program still records data to a log file. If a crash occurs and a user decides to allow the Microsoft Application Error Reporting process to submit a crash report to Microsoft, the last data collected by the Customer Experience Improvement Program is submitted as part of the report to help isolate where the problem occurred.

Note

A user who chooses to participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program is not prompted before the data is sent to a Microsoft data collection server; the data is automatically submitted when a sufficient quantity of data is collected.