Issues with Sharepoint 2007 Checkout when clicking directly on document links (not using the context menu)

Today, we opened up a Microsoft Support call for MOSS 2007 because we have had some issues with automatic prompting for checkout not working at all with Office 2003 products.

Essentially, we have enabled Force Check Out on the document library in question. The checkout works fine with the context menu (e.g. “Edit in Microsoft Office Word”), but not when the user clicks on the link directly. It was working before (ie the user would be prompted to checkout the item when clicking on the document link), but now it seems that Edit isn’t the default action anymore. It always opens readonly. In addition, recent items in word now always opens readonly

This is also critical because users can open the document, make their changes and then not be able to save it back to Sharepoint. We really need a seamless solution.

Other people also had the same problem:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2006/05/10/446000.aspx
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1253262&SiteID=17
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1799973&SiteID=1
http://msd2d.com/wb/default.asp?boardid=5&action=9&read=35469&fid=81
But they all were at a dead end. Some even opened up support tickets with no answer.

After ploughing through some of their code (e.g. looking at their calls to DispEx, their core.js files and STSNavigateWithCheckoutAlert() methods) in the javascript, we decided to lodge a support call to MS through SSW's www.ssw.com.au Gold Partnership. We get 5 per year.

One issue the MS support guys had was that they said "we don't support virtualized environments". However, according to this blog, this is not true at all - they DO support Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 installs with Sharepoint 2007
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/01/05/virtual-server-2005-r2-support-for-wss-3-0-and-moss-2007.aspx

We still don't have a solution to this issue - although unregistering and reregistering owssupp.dll
http://sphelpdesk.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!D9676F3678CF7BE7!122.entry made some of the files (e.g. .txt files) prompt the user to check out when clicking on the document link- we are headed in the right direction!

There are also around 50 (!) hotfixes for Sharepoint 2007 available already - many of them for critical issues - something to check if you have any of the hotfixable problems in your install.

Next step is to run sysinternals regmon on the client and server and send it to Microsoft Tech support.

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MS Access 2007 - Standard Templates Not using best practices

When starting development, it is a normal approach to use samples and templates to guide your development. The templates in Access 2007 are beautiful - but they use macros rather than VBA code. I don't agree that macros are the best way forward for anyone except for the very simplest of tasks. See my post here for Clint Covington's response http://blogs.msdn.com/clintcovington/archive/2007/05/21/design-inspiration-resources.aspx

Installing Sharepoint 2007 - NTLM vs Kerberos

Whilst installing MOSS 2007 on the Queensland Water Infrastructure test server today, the issue of NT LAN Manager VS Kerberos authenication came up. I have worked for a Sydney Software consulting company called Superior Software for Windows http://www.ssw.com.au/ full time for the last 8 years. Standard policy at SSW is to try and leave all install settings as default. This helps when diagnosing problems later down the track and helps to avoid custom install issues. However, in this case, the default option (NTLM) is in fact NOT the recommended option - it is Kerberos. Go figure. It would seem that Microsoft is encouraging the quick and dirty approach to security again!

For reasons you should use Kerberos Authentication - see the following post
http://ablog.apress.com/?p=1127