The most common problem on campus | Rickard Andersson

Without a doubt, the most common user issue we have on campus is students that do the following:

1. Click a link to a Word document in their Gmail (or somewhere else on the web).
2. When asked if they want to open of save the document, they select open.
3. They work on the document for a couple of hours and then hit save.
4. They log out.

The issue with this is that when you pick the open option in the open/save dialogue, the document gets downloaded into your “Temporary Internet Files” and then opened from there. It works, but Temporary Internet Files is a highly volatile place to store documents, in particular when Internet Explorer is set up to clear the folder when you log out (to keep roaming profile size to a minimum). In other words, the changes the student worked on are gone.

I don’t know how to solve this. I’m looking for a solution that does either of the following:

1. Defaults to save and disables the open option for particular file types in Internet Explorer.
2. Forces users to “save as” when the document has been “opened” through a browser.

Anyone?