Inconsistent behaviour of Protected View in Word vs Powerpoint

Question

Hello,

We have integrated Office with our application using the WebDav protocol. The user clicks on a file in our application, the file opens in their locally installed Office application ( Powerpoint, Word or Excel ), and upon save, the user's changes will be saved back in our application.

Now, if the user has enabled Protected View in their installed Office application, then they see different behaviours in Powerpoint vs Word.

When opening both PowerPoint and Word documents from online server in protected view, we are presented with a PROTECTED VIEW message with “Enable Editing” option.

But in case of Powerpoint, after clicking on Enable editing, the user is still not able to upload the edited document back to server and is presented with below error:

This behaviour is not present in MS Word, i.e, after clicking on “Enable Editing” in Word , user is able to save the edited document back to server and there is no Upload Failed message shown there.

 

Can you please help to understand why are there different behaviours with Powerpoint and Word for Protected View? And which of the two is the expected behaviour in this case?

Regards

Answer 1

Hello Rupali, Welcome to Q&A.

The inconsistent behavior you are experiencing with Protected View in PowerPoint and Word may be due to differences in the way these applications handle document security and permissions.

Protected View is a security feature in Microsoft Office that helps prevent malicious content from harming your computer. When a file is opened in Protected View, certain actions are disabled or restricted, such as editing or saving the file. This is to ensure that the file is safe and can be opened without risk to the user's computer.

In your case, it seems that when a PowerPoint file is opened in Protected View and the user clicks "Enable Editing", the file is not fully trusted and cannot be saved back to the server. This may be because PowerPoint has stricter security restrictions in place compared to Word.

On the other hand, when a Word file is opened in Protected View and the user clicks "Enable Editing", the file is still considered safe to save back to the server. This may be because Word has more flexible security restrictions in place or has a different way of handling file permissions.

In terms of which behavior is expected, it may depend on the specific use case and security requirements of your application. It is recommended to consult Microsoft's documentation on Protected View and work with your application developers and security team to determine the appropriate security settings for your environment.

It's also possible that the issue you're experiencing may be related to the WebDav protocol used to integrate Office with your application. You may want to review your WebDav implementation and ensure that it is configured correctly to support Protected View in both PowerPoint and Word.