.docx owa downloading as a zip?

Question

have an issue that for .docx files in owa are downloading as a zip file...

anyone help?

Answer 1

Out of the box, IIS6 only accepts requests for known MIME types. Since Office 2007 was released after Windows Server 2003 and IIS6, IIS6 knows nothing about the new MIME types. So you need to manually add them:

1.Open Computer Management. (Right-click My Computer... Manage...)
2.Right-click Internet Information Services (IIS) Management... Properties...
3.Click MIME Types...
4.Click New... and add the following:

Extension MIME Type - .xlsx application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet

• .xltx application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template

• .potx application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template

• .ppsx application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow

• .pptx application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation

• .sldx application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slide

• .docx application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document

• .dotx application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template

• .xlam application/vnd.ms-excel.addin.macroEnabled.12

• .xlsb application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12

N.B. These MIME types were added to IIS7 as noted in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936496

Answer 2

Are you using IE8 to access OWA? If so you need to add your OWA site to the trusted site list in IE8 for it to download properly.

Answer 3

Instead of determining the file type based on extension (which is the effect of adding the site to the Trusted Sites list), I would suggest fixing the MIME type reported by the server. This can be done by adding the file extensions for the new Office 2007 file types to the Exchange Internet Message Format types list according to the instructions at KB313730, reproduced here:

1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Microsoft Exchange, and then double-click System Manager.
2. Double-click Global Settings.
3. Right-click Internet Message Formats, and then click Properties.
4. On the General tab, click Add to open the Add MIME Content Type dialog box.
5. In the Type box, type the MIME content type, for example, text/html.
6. In the Associated Extension box, type the file extension to associate with the content type, for example, htm.
7. Click OK.

This should work in all versions of IE, but only for new emails sent since the change has been made - see http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/40890-can-not-open-docx-files-owa.html

Answer 4

I have total administrative control of both the server and the client machine involved with this problem and NONE of these proposed solutions worked for correcting this problem.

In the end, the only thing that FIXED this issue for me was to....

1) uninstall 7-Zip (so the browser has nothing to associate with the zip file)

2) (Not sure if this step is required, but) I then downloaded the DOCX again, (where, coincidentaly, it's still being presented as a ZIP file), however, this time I am prompted for what application to open it with and I choose MSWORD. I don't choose "Always open with MSWORD", because I don't want MSWORD always opening ZIP files.

3) Re-install 7-Zip.

After this, all subsequent attempts to download the DOCX, actually resulted in a DOCX file being download and opened with the appropriate MSWORD application.

NOTE: Before you jump to the conclusion that I simply had a broken file association, let me confirm, that when this problem was occurring, I could double-click on any DOCX in explorer and MSWORD would always open it. This problem was always and only occurring when trying to download/open a DOCX with IE8. FF4 and Chrome both worked flawlessly. I tried adding the proper MIME types to /etc/mime-types and to .htaccess on the server side. I also tried Disabling "Open files based on content, not file extension" (but this only resulted in the browser open the DOCX as unreadable ASCII text), setting the FEATURE_MIME_* registry keys to "0", and adding the server URL to the "Trusted Sites" list. Again, NONE OF THESE SEEMINGLY LOGICAL SOLUTIONS WORKED FOR ME.