Office URI Scheme working for some installations of Office 2016, but not others

Question

Office URI Scheme working for some installations of Office 2016, but not others

Brad Erickson 41

We have a web application that uses the Office URI scheme to open documents in Word for the user from their browser. For example:
ms-word:ofe|u|file://NetworkServer/Share/DocumentToOpen.docx

In our development and testing, this solution has worked perfectly for us with Office 365, Office 2019 and Office 2016.

However, when we set up a web app for a client that uses Office 2016, they reported that Office was giving them an error when trying to open documents this way:
"This action couldn't be performed because Office doesn't recognize the command it was given"

We attempted repairing the Office installation (as we've seen suggested) with no success.

We were able to produce the same error message ourselves when using an old machine with an Office 2013 installation.

To try to remove browser and Windows configurations from the equation, we confirmed that running the Office protocolhandler.exe directly through command prompt like this also produces the same error message for the non-working installs:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Root\Office16\protocolhandler.exe" "ms-word:ofe|u|file://NetworkServer/Share/DocumentToOpen.docx"

Running that same command (with appropriate paths) on our machines with Office 365, 2019 and 2016 all work as expected and the document opens in Word successfully.

A difference that we're seeing with our (working) installs of Office 2016 vs. the client's (non-working) install is the versioning:

Our working Office 2016 version:
Microsoft Word 2016 MSO (Version 2205 Build 16.0.15225.20028) 32-bit

Client's non-working Office 2016 version:
Microsoft Word 2016 (16.0.5317.1000) MSO (16.0.5278.1000) 64-bit

Does anyone have any thoughts on why the command would be functioning on one install of Office 2016, but not another?

Thanks!

Carlos Solís Salazar 18,201 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2022-07-07T12:39:58.65+00:00

Thank you for asking this question on the **Microsoft Q&A Platform. **

You have not received answers or comments to your question because it may be ambiguous or confusing.

I recommend you visit How to write a quality question and verify that your question meets some of the recommendations.

Hope this helps,
Carlos Solís Salazar

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OASE Software GmbH 15 Reputation points

2023-01-31T15:33:00.7566667+00:00

We are issuing the same problem. We'd like to open files on a shared folder. We found out that on Office 2016 and 2019 Standard this protocol seem not to work, but with Office 2016 or Office 2019 PRO the call succeeds and opens the corresponding application (word, excel aso) Does anybody know, whether this is restricted to PRO versions only?

1 answer

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Carlos Solís Salazar 18,201 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2022-07-07T12:39:58.65+00:00

Thank you for asking this question on the **Microsoft Q&A Platform. **

You have not received answers or comments to your question because it may be ambiguous or confusing.

I recommend you visit How to write a quality question and verify that your question meets some of the recommendations.

Hope this helps,
Carlos Solís Salazar

----------

NOTE: To answer you as quickly as possible, please mention me in your reply.
OASE Software GmbH 15 Reputation points

2023-01-31T15:33:00.7566667+00:00

We are issuing the same problem. We'd like to open files on a shared folder. We found out that on Office 2016 and 2019 Standard this protocol seem not to work, but with Office 2016 or Office 2019 PRO the call succeeds and opens the corresponding application (word, excel aso) Does anybody know, whether this is restricted to PRO versions only?

Answer 1

OASE Software GmbH 15

We also ran in to this problem. We found out, that the ProtocolHandler.exe on the systems where this is working has a size of over 8MB whereas on the clients where it is not working the ProtocolHandler.exe hast a size of only ~947KB.

We also found out, that on installations where Office XXXX Pro is installaed the requests are working but on Office XXXX Standard installations the call leads to the error.

We now hope, that not only the PRO versions of Office supports this URI-Schema??

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Office URI Scheme working for some installations of Office 2016, but not others

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