iT Hit WebDAV Office 2007 Opening Documents Read-only

Question

We have implemented WebDAV using iTHit Server and the Ajax Library. We experiencing an issue where documents are being opened as RO in some PCs and some open in compatibility mode (RW) with Office 2007...We are seeing different methods in the IIS log (and with Fiddler) on the OPTIONS and PropFind commands.. Microsoft+Office+Protocol+Discovery on Options opens RW.. Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir opens RO We are also seeing a couple of other methods with word 2010 (Microsoft+Office+Existence+Discovery and Microsoft+Office+Core+Storage+Infrastructure) and word 2013(Microsoft+Office+Word+2013) that also work fine...

What causes the different methods to be used? Is there a configuration setting that would force word 2007 to use the Microsoft+Office+Protocol+Discovery instead of the Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir?

Answer 1

There is no any options to disable MS Office Discovery protocol as far as we know. Every MS Office version implements opening a document differently, some use Discovery, others not.

The most typical cause of the read-only issue with MS Office 2007 is non-root WebDAV location. Microsoft Office 2007 and earlier versions and Windows Shell (Mini-Redirector) submit OPTIONS and PROPFIND requests to site the root and each sub-folder in file path. For example, if your document is located at http://server/DAV/Folder/mydoc.docx, Microsoft Office submits OPTIONS and PROPFIND requests to the following URLs:

http://server/
http://server/DAV/ 
http://server/DAV/Folder 

If your server does not provide a response to these OPTIONS and PROPFIND requests Microsoft Office may open your document as read-only or will be unable to save the document directly to the server. You can find more information about how Microsoft Office opens documents from web here.

Please find more details about read-only issue here: http://www.webdavsystem.com/server/documentation/ms_office_read_only

Answer 2

I had a similar situation with Office files opening in readonly mode. The other symptom of the same problem was with file types other than MS Office. Attempting to open PDFs, images, text files, etc. would all result in a error code 67, "the network name cannot be found". Both of these issues were resolved when I uninstalled the Web DAV publishing feature of IIS and rebooted the server.