ms-word:ofv|u| style links for Office Edit Online?

[gagravarr]

Based on Troubleshooting Alfresco Office Services | Alfresco Documentation and my own testing, Alfresco Office Services + Edit Online doesn't work for 64 bit versions of IE, because it's powered by an office browser plugin that isn't currently produced by Microsoft for 64 bit. This is starting to be an issue for us, as our IT team are rolling out more and more 64 bit versions of windows programs.

Whilst having a play with the latest SharePoint Online, I noticed that that is able to launch Office for online editing with both 32 and 64 bit versions of IE + Office. Instead of using the plugin though, it seems to be using URLs of the form ms-wordfv|u|https://..... .

Has anyone tried getting Alfresco to generate links like

ms-word:ofv|u|https://..../alfresco/aos/Sites/xxxx/documentLibrary/xxxx.doc

and got edit online working with 64 bit that way? Does it work? Any gotchas / un-implemented bits of SharePoint emulation on the Alfresco side that break things?

[afaust · Accepted solution]

Alfresco actually already uses the ofe: style URLs to open documents albeit only in specific use cases when the plugin is not available. This does not seem to cover 64 bit (which is difficult/impossible to detect in web apps). The code starting at the following line handles this: share/actions.js at fab09705778b71d4c424279ab3d433b93fdb74ce · Alfresco/share · GitHub

It works and I have in one past project implemented a custom solution that always uses the ofe: style links in the first place. Default Alfresco can't do that (yet) as they need to support multiple combinations of operation system and Office, and it is not guaranteed to be able to detect beforehand if the specific combination the user uses supports the URL-based approach (although Alfresco attempts this in order to display an error message).