Office 2003 users not being forced to check out, 2007 users are…

Question

I have set all our document libraries to force check out for editing of documents. Office 2007 users get a nice dialogue box telling them they must check out before editing (which they can click and sharepoint will check it out for them) or they can click read to open a read only copy. Office 2003 users just get a potential unsafe download warning (with 'ok' and 'cancel' as options). If clicking 'ok' it sometimes opens as read only and sometimes in edit mode (without checking out first). This is getting frustrating for our users of Office 2003. Is there a way to fix this so that Office 2003 instances operates the same way as Office 2007?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Does it depend on how the file is opened?

To explain, here's how thing go in my installation with Office 2003:

• If I click on the title of a document then I get the warning you mention, and if I click OK then the document opens read-only in the corresponding app.
• If I click next to the title to get the little popup menu and then select edit in MS Office Word, then I get 2 prompts -- first a question whether I want to check out, and if I click yes then I get the warning as above, and it opens checked out.