Good evening folks,I have also posted this in Word forum.
How / why does Word XP handle the document template property when opening documents created in past versions of word.?
Have we missed something about upgrading to Office XP. Could we have anticipated this problem ?
Oh for standardisation of templates.
A site has just upgraded the servers, machines & OS, replaced desktop pcs and upgraded to Office XP on Win XP Pro. Roll out was to just over 100 desktops.
There is a Unix box in the mix as well running financials.
The upgrade was staged, servers migrated first.
Upgrade was from NT4 Server, Win 98 and Office 97.
A significant number MS Office Word documents became hellishly slow to open across the network. Often word reportedly timed out according to Task Manager, but eventually the doc opened anyway. The winword process showed as still running despite Task manager Applications reporting differently.
I tracked the problem down to Word XP trying to locate the original template the doc was created with. This was impossible in many cases as either ..
1 The server machine that the UNC pointed to had long since disappeared.
2 A USERNAME in theUNC path was long gone
There are thousands of effected documents.
Our solution involved a programmer writing a piece of code that opened the binary file and replaced the offending path reference with “normal” before saving & closing the file again.
Fortunately the coding only took a short time, a couple hrs to write and test.
The alternative was to go to Tools >> Templates & add-ins and remove the offending path before saving & closing the file.
Before we run the routine over the week end is there something we have missed that will come back and bite us harder.
Regards
Geof
