We were experiencing this same problem. Here is the response from the Campus Pack folk:
Thanks for checking in. We're looking forward to hearing your full feedback. I do recommend that you download the latest version,
2.5.5, from our website, as it contains some important bug fixes and new features.
About the file attachment problem, this is a known issue with Blackboard and Microsoft Internet Explorer. I've opened issue
SUPPORT-409 for you, and if we find a way to work around the problem in our software we'll be sure to let you know when we have an
updated release. The short story is that you should always Save attached files rather than Opening them.
Open does not work reliably on MSIE. Note that users of Mozilla-based browsers (including Firefox and Netscape) are not affected.
I'll explain the problem in a little more detail. Blackboard automatically sets special header values on every page that tell the
browser not to cache the page. Normally, this is a good thing, since it prevents browsers from showing out-of-date versions of
dynamic pages.
With files that don't display within the browser, however, this can cause problems. When you tell MSIE to open a file, what it
really does is saves the file to a temporary location, tells the appropriate application to open the file, and then deletes the
temporary file.
Unfortunately, this does not take into account the amount of time it takes the application to start up, so in effect you end up
with a race between the application opening the file and MSIE deleting it. So the reason you were able to get some word documents
to open correctly was most likely because the application was already loaded in memory and could open those documents before they
were deleted, but this may not work for all files or on all computers.
The reason that this problem does not happen with files uploaded to Blackboard content areas is that Blackboard specifically
disables the no-cache headers on their own content files, but unfortunately they do not document a way for Building Blocks
developers to disable the headers for the files within their tools. We are still investigating ways to work around this behavior
for all file types, but with version 2.5 and later of Campus Pack, we have reduced the severity of the problem for Office files by
having them open in the browser directly when you click on them using Internet Explorer. So I would recommend that you upgrade to
2.5.5 to receive that change. Any file types that cannot open directly in the browser (e.g., ZIP files) are still affected by this
problem, however. In those cases, you will always need to Save rather than Open the files, or use a browser other than MSIE.
<end of comments from Campus Pack>
Hope that helps!
Brian
Brian Irwin
Lecturer in Academic Professional Development
Academic Practice Group
Learning & Teaching Institute
Sheffield Hallam University
0114 225 3874
-----Original Message-----
From: Blackboard/Courseinfo userslist [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sandra Windeatt
Sent: 21 March 2006 16:39
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: CAMPUS PACK? JOURNALS AND TEAMS (WIKI)
Hello - is anyone else using the campus pack? MS Office Files added to the JOURNAL or the TEAMS sites won't display in the IE
browser - we get 'invalid filepath' errors with the filepath given as the user's temporary internet folders on their C: drive.
However, files can be saved and opened from the user's own drive or opened directly by Firefox users.
I accept Volker Kleinschmidt's point on the previous message - Mac problem - that we really shouldn't be asking the browser to do
this - however, in my institution, the use of BB has been built on staff being able to upload MS Office files which users can then
open and access using IE. And, if they can do it in the content areas, and, if the program encourages it by providing the
functionality to let people upload files then they expect to be able to do so.
Any ideas? I was really enjoying getting going with these tools but this is going to cause some problems for staff and students -
because I've found however many times you tell people to right-click and save then mostly they just don't.
Oh and P.S. Volker said that we should use html or images if we want to display within the browser but image files don't open in
our campus pack either (if inserted as linked files rather than as images).
Sandra
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