Configuring IIS6 to Serve Office 2007 File Formats

2007-10-11 james 18 comments

You upload an Office 2007 file (pptx, xlsx, docx, etc.) to your IIS6 web server and someone tries to download it, but receives:

HTTP Error 404 – File or directory not found.

Internet Information Services (IIS)

The file is on the server. The URL is correct. You can even download ppt, doc, xls, zip, and other files from the same location. What’s up???

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:

Open Computer Management. (Right-click My Computer… Manage…)
Right-click Internet Information Services (IIS) Management… Properties…
Click MIME Types…
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 KB936496.

ASP.NET none

#1 | Written by Arlene Darrow about 17 years ago. Reply

RE: Configuring IIS6 to Serve Office 2007 File Formats

Would you know how to add the new Office 2007 MIME types in Visual Studio 2005? It doesn’t use IIS.

Thanks
#2 | Written by James Kovacs about 17 years ago. Reply

VS 2005 (and VS 2008 for that matter) use Cassini, a web server written in C#. Cassini is a very simple web server and will serve up (locally) any file you ask for. It doesn’t require any special configuration for the Office 2007 document types. This is one of the reasons why, although Cassini is convenient for development, you need to test your code under IIS. Depending on the complexity of what you’re doing, it’s sometimes best to forgo Cassini completely and just develop and debug directly in IIS.
#3 | Written by Tim Vasil about 16 years ago. Reply

Thanks for the tip. It looks like you need to restart the World Wide Web Publishing service for these changes to take effect.
#4 | Written by Randy about 16 years ago. Reply

Thanks, this was very helpful.
#5 | Written by Chris Dicamillo about 16 years ago. Reply

Thank you for posting this.
#6 | Written by Sarah about 16 years ago. Reply

I’m having the same problem on my MacBook laptop. How do I configure it to work with the Office 2007 File Formats. I can’t open ones designated as MIME-type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
#7 | Written by James Kovacs about 16 years ago. Reply

The issue for client applications is completely different. You need an application that supports the new XML-based file formats, such as Mac Office 2008.
#8 | Written by Travis about 15 years ago. Reply

thanks for the info 🙂
#9 | Written by Svend Langelund about 15 years ago. Reply

Hi
Our school / students and teachers are using both Outlook Client 2007 and Owa with succes until Office2007 now is introduced. The users have Iexpl 8.0.

Status just now:
When at user creates and send at DOCX file with OWA – receiving the mail and reading the DOCx works fine in both OWA and O-client.
BUT if the same user sends the same DOCX file with OutlookClient – the recieving person using OWA only recieves a ZIP file .. if the recieving person uses Outlook Client it works fine…
The Exchange2003Entreprise/Win2003 is fully updates (pr 1. sept 2009) and Mime types is added to the default website of Owa.
Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Sinc
Svend
ps if using Firefox received Docx opens fine..
#10 | Written by Luke about 14 years ago. Reply

Svend, I’m having a similar issue. If I save docx on my computer with owa, it defaults to a docx file, if i do the same on another computer, it defaults to a zip file. Both have Office 2007 and XP sp3. The OWA server has all the MIME types added properly. Did you find a solution for your problem?
#11 | Written by James about 14 years ago. Reply

I haven’t seen this issue, though I’m not a sysadmin by trade. You’ll probably have better luck getting an answer on ServerFault than my little corner of the web. Hope you find a solution.
#12 | Written by Nirav about 14 years ago. Reply

Hey James,
Awesome article..unfortunately I am not been able to get out of my trouble.. I have a website and at a place I am allowing admin users to upload a file and users to view that file(pretty simple stuff) now the problem is when admin uploads any of the file say ppt, doc, jpg the user are able to view it correctly with the appropriate program,Now I need to add extension for pptx and ppsx, as per your info I added new MIME types for both extensions. I know its strange but the files with pptx are getting open with powerpoint 2007 with a warning but ppsx files are not opening at all…I hope you get my issue and would help me out this..

Thanks
#13 | Written by James about 14 years ago. Reply

@Nirav – I’m not sure what the problem is. Given that pptx are giving you a warning in PowerPoint, that means that IIS is successfully serving up the file. So I would check whether the pptx files contain any macros or other content that would cause this warning. (It might be due to an internet zone ID. Try right-clicking the downloaded file and seeing if there is an option to unblock it.) As for the ppsx files, I would use a network analyzer (WireShark or Microsoft Network Analyzer) or web debugging proxy (e.g. Fiddler) to see if the file is being served up by IIS. If it is, I would start investigating on the client to see if there might be a problem. If not, I would check your server logs for the request and returned error codes. HTH.
#14 | Written by Nick about 14 years ago. Reply

A quicker (and transparent) way of making the new MIME types active is to refresh the Application Pool(s) in IIS rather than re-starting the WWW Publishing service (which is not transparent to users).
#15 | Written by Robert about 13 years ago. Reply

Hi, thanks, it worked!

Would you know if there is a way to update a large amount of different servers (in various locations) easely?
Like a registry key or something?
I guess that Microsoft has a trick or a tool to do so maybe…

Anyhow, thank you very much!
Have a nice day.
- #16 | Written by James about 13 years ago. Reply
  
  @Robert – You should be able to script this using VBScript and WMI. IIS6 has a metabase, which is similar to – though separate from – the Windows registry. Take a look here for more information on accessing the IIS6 metabase using WMI. HTH.
#17 | Written by Eva Young about 13 years ago. Reply

Thank you so much for this well written tip. This has been an annoyance of mine for a long time, and your advice worked like a charm.
#18 | Written by Kristie about 13 years ago. Reply

Thanks, it worked.

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