File types active directory

[jonwallace]

Background: We have a number of PCs (winxp) with a mix of Openoffice and MS Office. Users have to login with their AD username/password and access and edit documents stored in a Document Management system (QPulse). This fails on some PCs with OpenOffice unless I associated .doc with OpenOffice on these PCs.

Does anyone know what effect changing a filetype association would have on an Active Directory profile? What happens if I associated .doc with OpenOffice on a PC and that user later logs in to a PC with MSOffice on it?

I could try it (at the risk of screwing up my already sensitive AD profile), but I thought I would ask you guys instead of re-inventing the wheel...

[HansV]

This is (far) outside my field, but I thought that file associations are local to a PC - they are stored in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, not in HKEY_CURRENT_USER. So they shouldn't affect the user profile.
But I may be completely off...

[jonwallace]

I'll post back with personal experiences...

[JoeP]

What sort of error do they get?

File association per se should not have anything to do with it. If the OpenOffice program is try to access a file in the Document Management System directly it is probably an OpenOffice issue when interfacing with the documents management system.

Joe

[jonwallace]

What sort of error do they get?

File association per se should not have anything to do with it. If the OpenOffice program is try to access a file in the Document Management System directly it is probably an OpenOffice issue when interfacing with the documents management system.

Joe

They don't get an error per se, on an unmodified system, the document (.doc, we have mainly Office 2003 on those PCs with MS Office) does nothing if it is accessed via QPulse's interface or if it is double-clicked in a folder window it just pops up a save-as box . If I right-click a .doc and choose open with, then tick the "always use" box and choose Writer, then everything works as it should.

The question was whether this would bork the file associations in an active directory profile. Hans' answer seem logical, but I haven't tried it yet. I'm going off for a week and I don't want to break anything before I go. My current advice to them, is to use one of the PCs that work the way it's supposed to. (These are multi-user Windows XP boxes dotted about a lab that are used with a local generic login for lab work, but require users to login to Active Directory to get access to the servers)