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SharePoint 2007 documents not opening in Office 2007

James Clements — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:39:18 +0000

Our company Intranet was deployed on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and has been in operation for a few months. I recently had a user that reported that they were experiencing difficulties opening documents from their Team Site. A quick check revealed this problem actually affected all documents for the user and not just those in their Team Site. When the user clicked on any SharePoint document to open it they were presented with the dialog box with options to open the document in 'Read Only' or 'Edit' mode. Opening any document in 'Read Only' mode opened the document in the relevant Microsoft Office application but obviously did not allow them to save it directly back into SharePoint. Opening any document in 'Edit' mode failed to launch the Microsoft Office application associated with that document. This was the case for all Microsoft Office document types.

As the issue did not affect anyone else I made the assumption it was local to the computer. I had a quick look at the Internet Explorer addons that were loaded and could see that the 'SharePointOpenDocuments' was enabled (as it should have been.)

Since the addon was being loaded and in part seemed to be working I had a quick look to see if multiple versions of owssupp.dll existed. owssupp.dll is the Microsoft Office SharePoint Client Support library used by Internet Explorer as the addon called 'SharePointOpenDocuments'. When the addon is loaded and you attempt to open a document from a SharePoint site it displays a small dialog box prompting the user to choose between opening the document in 'Read Only' or 'Edit' mode.

The library owssupp.dll is installed to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office(##) and I had heard of issues where multiple versions of the file had existed on a computer (as a result of a Microsoft Office upgrade) and caused issues. I only had one instance of owssupp.dll located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12 so I ruled this out.

The next thing I tried was re-registering the .dll on the computer. I closed all instances of Microsoft Office applications and then at a command prompt I ran the following:

regsvr32 "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OWSSUPP.DLL"

I received the following error message:

I clicked OK to close the message box. I opened Internet Explorer and navigated to the Team Site. Upon clicking on a document and selecting 'Edit' from the dialog box the correct Microsoft Office application opened and I was able to edit the document normally.

KiXtart script to enable Outlook Anywhere or RPC-HTTPS

James Clements — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:43:27 +0000

At work, people were using VPN to access their email out of the office, but I have always thought that logging into a corporate network via VPN for most users is an extra hassle that they could probably do without. I had considered setting up RPC over HTTPS for Exchange 2003 but during a meeting regarding disaster recovery it became evident it was actually now a necessity. So, after configuring the server for RPC-HTTPS I had the small problem of deploying the settings to Outlook clients en masse.

I had already used a KiXtart logon script to configure 'Cached Mode' for my Outlook 2003/7 clients by modifying some HKCU registry keys for users - Regkey to enable & disable Outlook 2003 cached mode.

After setting up an Outlook client in VMware Workstation I configured RPC-HTTPS and exported the regkey from the post above (see below for the key.) A fresh install of Outlook with a clean profile and the above key imported revealed that the settings for RPC-HTTPS are stored in the same place as those in the post for enabling cached mode. A combination of changing the values in Outlook and using Regmon allowed me to narrow down exactly what each registry value is used for and the data that each value needs to contain (the data for each registry value is stored as type REG_BINARY which as hexadecimal is unreadable.)

Here is an outline of the registry key and each value with my own description:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\(profilename)\13dbb0c8aa05101a9bb000aa002fc45a

00036623 = Enables 'Connect to Microsoft Exchange using HTTP' as well as 'On fast/slow networks...'
00036627 = Sets the proxy server authentication type (data: 01000000 -> Basic, 02000000 -> NTLM)
001f6622 = Sets the 'proxy server for Exchange' (https://) text box
001f6625 = Sets the 'this principle name' text box

One other registry key I had to set (as per KB820281) to stop clients being prompted for a username/password was:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

lmcompatibilitylevel = 3

I amended my KiXtart login script as follows with the new registry keys, values and their data. The next time users logged on they were connected using RPC over HTTPS:

WRITEVALUE("HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa", "lmcompatibilitylevel", "3", "REG_DWORD")
WRITEVALUE("HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook\13dbb0c8aa05101a9bb000aa002fc45a", "00036623", "2b000000", "REG_BINARY")
WRITEVALUE("HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook\13dbb0c8aa05101a9bb000aa002fc45a", "00036627", "02000000", "REG_BINARY")
WRITEVALUE("HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook\13dbb0c8aa05101a9bb000aa002fc45a", "001f6622", "xxxx", "REG_BINARY")
WRITEVALUE("HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook\13dbb0c8aa05101a9bb000aa002fc45a", "001f6625", "xxxx", "REG_BINARY")

You can verify that users are connected using RPC over HTTPS by holding down CTRL and SHIFT on the keyboard and using the mouse to right-click the system tray icon. Click on the 'Connection Status...' option and you will see that the 'Conn' column displays multiple connections of type: HTTPS.

Regkey to enable & disable Outlook 2003 cached mode

James Clements — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:38:20 +0000

Pre Microsoft office 2003 SP3, when creating a new MAPI email account in outlook 2003 the default setting was to "Use Cached Exchange Mode". I have noticed that after installing SP3 the default seems to now be disabled when creating an email account.

The following registry key allows you to enable it again and can obviously be scripted to run for users at logon:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\(profilename)\13dbb0c8aa05101a9bb000aa002fc45a

Change the data stored within the 00036601 (REG_BINARY) value. These are the usable items of data that can be stored within the key value:

84 01 00 00 = cached mode enabled for email (the default setting pre SP3)
84 05 00 00 = cached mode enabled for email, and public folders
04 00 00 00 = cached mode disabled (default setting post SP3)