We have had this problem, and struggled with it for ages trying to open
some Office documents on the FERL site. I don't think it's a Blackboard
problem; we narrowed it down to a failure within Windows at the point
when IE "called" another application, like MS Word. We found that when
the link failed to open, both MS Word and Outlook froze and froze and we
could only recover by closing Word via the Task Manager. Although our
technical team kept returning to the support call we never did resolve
it.
I was preparing to send you the following link from FERL to confirm that
there is a problem when I discovered that it now works on our system! It
will be interesting to see if it opens for you
http://ferl.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=3931
We were unable to open the hyperlinked flowchart on that page - the
direct link is
http://ferl.becta.org.uk/content_files/ferl/pages/store_cupboard/subject
dayinputs/business/psc_Bus_econ/flow_chart_financial.doc
I quizzed the techs on your behalf, of course, who insisted that they
have never knowingly sorted it and indeed the only change they have made
to the system in the meantime is to proxy server routing. This makes me
wonder if there has been a Windows update that adjusted something - have
you installed recent updates?
I'm sorry that I can't offer a solution but perhaps it helps to know
that the problem is not just confined to your system. I was curious to
see if the links in your mail would also work but I was barred by a
password request. Would you expect this?
Regards,
John Green, Northbrook College.
-----Original Message-----
From: Blackboard/Courseinfo userslist
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Andy Turner
Sent: 29 June 2006 11:36
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Problems opening documents in the CMS
Hello
This has cropped up before, I think, so apologies if I'm going over old
ground.
We are having problems opening some files - particularly Word docs -
stored in the Content System (we're on BB 6.2 at present). There is no
problem when a link is made from an Item in a content area on the course
e.g. using Attach File from Content System.
But there is a problem if you copy and paste the URL of the document
into
the Internet Explorer address bar; also if you create a link to the Word
document from within a Powerpoint presentation.
In either case you get an IE error message saying that "Internet
Explorer
was unable to open this internet site. The requested item is either
unavailable or cannot be found"
A specific example is a file called Programme Hnadbook Adult Branch.doc
for which the URL is:
http://blackboard.tvu.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/courses/MPHP2006trial/Programme%
20Hnadbook%20Adult%20Branch.doc
This is 102 characters long - is it the length of the filename which IE
can't handle? I tried renaming the file to
http://blackboard.tvu.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/courses/MPHP2006trial/PBA.doc - a
mere 68 characters - and still it wouldn't load.
Firefox, incidentally, can handle either of these URLs with no problem,
so
it seems it must be an IE-related issue. But, just to complicate matters
further, IE managed to open an MP3 file with a URL 259 characters long!
(the filename itself was 198 characters long)
According to the Microsoft support site, maximum URL length is 2,083
characters in Internet Explorer, while Windows does not support a file
or
path name of longer than 255 characters.
I'm baffled, but I'm quite sure someone out there will know the cause,
and
probably a solution too.
all the best
Andy Turner
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