Property panel is missing in MS Word when opening a document from SharePoint 2010

Question

We have a SharePoint 2010 test farm, which is accessed using HTTPS. Since it is a test farm, a test server certificate is used (when opening a MS Word document this causes 2 messages since the certificate path can not be validated and the refocation cannot be checked). The farm consists of 2 front end servers which are load balanced.

In the office we are working with MS Office 2003. When we open a MS Word document sometimes we get the Property panel in MS Word (to access the metadata of the document in SharePoint), but sometimes the Property panel is missing.

This problem can be reproduced on a single client machine, when opening one and the same document several times.

Does anybody know what causes this problem and how we can solve it? Could it be related to the loadbalanced or could it be related to the test certificate? Are there other possible causes that we are missing?

Answer 1

Our acceptance environment has just been delivered. For the acceptance environment we have a valid server certificate. On the acceptance environment the descibed problem cannot be reproduced!

Since the same software is installed and the farm configuration is also the same, our conclusion is that the problem occured due to the test certificate.