Office 2007 formats in DMS

Use

Since Office 2007 is released on the market the new extensions (docx, xlsx,...) lead to several questions in the SAP DMS area. So it might be happen that Office 2007 applications raise some warning messages because the local copy of an original has only the 'old' extension xls or doc. Even if they were created with Office 2007 and new file formats.

Reason

Please note that SAP Document Management generally support the file format of Office 2007. But due to the fact that this change in file format is a very new one and the latest SAP Releases ERP2004 and ERP2005 were released some time before, the customizing field 'Suffix' could not be enlarged to four digits. So it is only possible to maintain suffix values like 'doc' or 'xls' and therefore the 'old' extensions were used if you display or edit an original. For furhter information please take a look at the SAP note 1147660, which was created by the Office Integration colleagues.

Workaround

What I can offer you is a possible workaround, which was sent to me be another customer for this behavior to achieve that the local copied files have a extension like .xlsx or .docx. For this workaround the following steps are necessary:

1. We created a new workstation applications for the new file extensions with the mime-types of the new office applications (XLX, WRX and PPX).
2. We customized them with %AUTO% %NO-LEAVE% instead of %SAP-OFFICE-INTEGRATION.OUTPLACE% %MAXSIZE%
3. We used a BADI on BEFORE_CHECKOUT event to determine if workstation application is one of the XLX or WRX or PPX. If it is, we set the target temporary file extension to the corresponding 4 characters of the new extensions. This means that we can display "USER01.xlsx", in the user local PC, as a real office 2007 file.

However please note that this is just a possible solution and means to be a modification to the standard system.

Generally I would recommend you to maintain the following settings for working with Office 2007 and the new formats.

• In transaction DC30 I would recommend you to maintain also the new file extensions (e.g. *.docx) or *.* as a general file format entry. This will avoid that you cannot add originals with the new file format to your document info records. This is very important if you have implemented SAP notes 948177 and 967839 which brings a tighter file format check into your system.
• Further I would recommend you to test the behavior if you set the 'Do not rename temporary files' flag in transaction DC30. This will lead to the behavior that the file name is not changed if you check out or display the original file. Maybe this could also help to avoid that the original filname is changed or corrupted.
  

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