The Right Stuff

As you probably know some applications of the 2007 Office System introduce new file extensions. Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 save their data in a new XML-based format by default. To distinguish between the old (binary) and new (XML) file formats Microsoft has created some four-letter file extensions like docx for Word documents. The XML files are stored in a zip container, if you rename such files to have a zip extension, you can peek inside them with WinZip and other zip-aware tools.

If you upload documents created with the 2007 Office System to your WSS 2.0/SharePoint 2003 server you will see that the file icon in front of the file name is missing. This is because those versions of SharePoint essentially are not aware of the new file types. You'll have to register the new file types with SharePoint and provide icons for them.

1. Download my set of Office 2007 icons.
   The archive contains 16x16 icons in 32-bits color-depth for all new file types. You'll also find five subfolders with the icons saved in the GIF, JPEG and PNG formats (GIF and JPEG with light and dark backgrounds for transparency). The Photoshop Automation.jsx script can be used to create all five images on the fly using Photoshop's scripting functionality - be sure to install the Photoshop ICO plugin first.
   If you want to extract other icons, these are embedded resources of the executables inside the C:\WINDOWS\Installer\{90120000-0030-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}\ folder.
2. Choose an image format appropriate to your SharePoint style – I went with the images from the gif-light folder as these suit the default SharePoint theme.
3. Copy the images to the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\ folder on your SharePoint server.
4. Open the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\XML\docicon.xml file with an editor. Add the following lines under the ByExtension element. Be sure to change the file extension (Value attribute) based on the image format you chose.
   

   <Mapping Key="docx" Value="docx.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office Word" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="docm" Value="docm.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office Word" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="dotx" Value="dotx.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office Word" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="dotm" Value="dotm.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office Word" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="xlsx" Value="xlsx.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office Excel" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="xlsm" Value="xlsm.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office Excel" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="xltx" Value="xltx.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office Excel" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="xltm" Value="xltm.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office Excel" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="xlsb" Value="xlsb.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office Excel" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="xlam" Value="xlam.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office Excel" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="pptx" Value="pptx.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office PowerPoint" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="pptm" Value="pptm.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office PowerPoint" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="potx" Value="potx.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office PowerPoint" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="potm" Value="potm.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office PowerPoint" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="ppam" Value="ppam.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office PowerPoint" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="ppsx" Value="ppsx.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office PowerPoint" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   <Mapping Key="ppsm" Value="ppsm.gif" EditText="Microsoft Office PowerPoint" OpenControl="SharePoint.OpenDocuments"/>
   

5. Reset IIS by running iisreset.exe.
6. You can test if the new icons work if you download this zip with sample documents. Upload the files to a document library. If everything worked, you should see something like this:
   

The next step would be to let SharePoint index the new file types making them searchable. Unfortunately there are publicly available IFilters available yet. Even the new Windows Desktop Search 3.0 doesn't crawl docx and the like. Update: It appears there's a configuration issue with Windows Desktop Search on my machine as WDS just does not crawl my documents folder.

Another Update: A reader asked why documents of the Office 2007 flavor are handled differently by SharePoint. Instead of opening a docx in Word when you left-click the document's name, the browser shows a download dialog. Old-style doc files will be opened instantly by Word (assuming you're using Internet Explorer and have the SharePoint collaboration components installed).

Currently I have no idea how to make the new file types handled the same as the old files. After all, I'm no SharePoint expert. A workaround for this issue is to click the triangle on the right to the document name and choose "Edit in Microsoft Word" from the drop down list of actions.

Another thing that may help is adding the MIME types for Office 2007 documents in IIS. Without them, SharePoint serves 2007-style file types with the "application/octet-stream" generic content-type. The easiest way to do this is stopping IIS and editing the metabase XML file (C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\MetaBase.xml) using a text editor. Search for the <IIsMimeMap Location="/LM/MimeMap" …> element and append these lines to the MimeMap attribute:

.docm,application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12
.docx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
.dotm,application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12
.dotx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template
.potm,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.template.macroEnabled.12
.potx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template
.ppam,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.addin.macroEnabled.12
.ppsm,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slideshow.macroEnabled.12
.ppsx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow
.pptm,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.12
.pptx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation
.xlam,application/vnd.ms-excel.addin.macroEnabled.12
.xlsb,application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12
.xlsm,application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12
.xlsx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
.xltm,application/vnd.ms-excel.template.macroEnabled.12
.xltx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template

Be sure to add one MIME type per line. This will make the MIME types globally available on the server. After saving the metabase file, restart IIS.

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