Monday 21 September 2009

Office 2010 TP – Remote Document In SharePoint Fails To Open

A while back, we posted about the ability to Favourite a SharePoint library in Windows 7 and how that virtually eliminates the need for a VPN for most user needs.

So, we have our General Documents library in our Companyweb (SBS 2003 WSS v2):

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Once we click on the RWW – GD favourite we will be prompted for our network credentials:

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Once our Windows Explorer window opens we will see the following in the address bar:

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Double click on a Word or Excel document in the library and another prompt will come up identical to the one above. Once authenticated, we would expect the document to open. But instead, this is what we see:

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A blank document. No amount of coaxing will get the remotely located document to open in Word. It needs to be copied to the local desktop to be worked on then copied back into the library.

We had installed Office 2010 TP on both the shop laptop and the Netbook as well as one of the shop PCs. But, for now this is a show stopper for the laptop and the Netbook.

Office 2010 will remain installed only on machines that are accessing documents on the local network.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This has been a very sad limitation of the Office 2010 TP. I'm not sure if Sharepoint 2010 is in public Beta yet but when 2010TP came out, it wasn't. The only sharepoint stuff you could open was from Sharepoint 2010.

Now there have been a lot of conspiracy theories going around with the whole limited upgrade path to Exchange 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 that basically can be summed up by Microsoft wanting everyone to go to Software Assurance and using these quick turn arounds with limited backwards compatibility as the main pushing mechanism.

I just assumed it was an early beta so you don't know what you are going to get.

Anyways, this has been a known problem since day 1 and is mentioned frequently on the Connect page. Surprised you didn't see it there man.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Rosewood,

I did not check into Connect due to time constraints. So, I fired off an e-mail to some folks that may have an answer for us.

I find it extremely hard to believe that Microsoft would purposefully break something to get everyone to upgrade.

I do remember hearing someone say something about the new collaborative lock-out and authoring features will find their home in MOSS 2010, but not that working with Office documents in any SharePoint version was being discontinued.

Philip