Bug with MOSS 2007 and Office 2003
While MOSS 2007 adoption seems to continue at an incredible rate, upgrading to Office 2007 seems to be going much slower. Most clients I work with have MOSS 2007 with Office 2003 on the desktop. That has often begged the question "Do we lose any functionality by not having Office 2007?" Go to the Microsoft website and you can find good documentation on Office 2007-only features. Well, I just found another...
One of my colleagues, Nicholas Bisciotti, recently told me of a bug he discovered with MOSS 2007 and Office 2003. Actually, it is a pretty big one... and, for the most part, not advertised well. Here are the steps to recreate:
From a computer that has Office 2003, browse to a SharePoint Server 2007 document library which has content types
* Open the document in Edit mode
* Make an edit to the document
* File, Save
* A script error appears
* Click yes to the error until it disappears
* Open the document, notice the changes to the document were saved
* Open the document properties, notice the metadata values have been reset
So, when using Office 2003 (this issue does not exist with Office 2007) and MOSS 2007 document libraries with content types, there is a scenario where metadata on the documents are lost when editing and saving from Office. Ouch!!! As far as we can see, this is a known issue with Microsoft but no fixes are available. Options? Upgrade to Office 2007 or don't use content types. Not attractive alternatives (at least for a short term fix). We'll track this one and advise as soon as we know more...