We have a small number of citrix servers that all have office installed. Only a small subset of users have access to office. Everyone is set to open office documents with the free viewers on the Citrix servers. We control access to office through NTFS permissions. We now have a large number of users who need to be able to view office documents from a webpage. Opening office files normally works fine. When users open the office documents from the link in a webpage, it ignores the file associations and attempts to open the document with the full office program.
How can I change the program that IE uses to open office documents, or how can I force it to use the file associations I set in the operating system?
My understanding is that IE uses the content mime type to determine which program to load the file. The mime type for word documents can vary, but testing with wireshark shows the following response headers to downloading a .doc file from an IIS webserver:
Looks like you may need to make some changes to the registry to get the file to load in a different program.