How to avoid triggering Protected View on automatically generated documents? 1

[Griffyn]

Hi all,

The company I support has an internal webservice that generates Excel 2003 documents (reports) on demand and allows the employee to download them. When these documents are opened in Excel 2016, they always open in Protected View. This is annoying, as there are a few extra clicks involved for the user to allow printing.

Is there a way to automatically trust the documents generated by this webservice? They're being generated via COM, and I can freely modify this software. I don't want to disable Protected View for other documents that the user is e-mailed or downloads from the internet, just ones generated by this webservice.

From what I can tell, signing each document with a digital certificate and then setting up each employee's office installation to trust this certificate seems the way to go, but I can't find any definitive proof of this, or how to generate such a certificate.

Any help please?

 

[strongm]

Should be able to bypass Protected Mode by putting file in Trusted location.

 

[Griffyn]

The files are downloaded via the user's browser, or e-mailed to the user. I can't set those locations per-user as trusted, as they will be used by any file and attachment from every other source.

 

[strongm]

In which case, consider adding the URL of the server you are downloading from to your Trusted Sites list. This won't fix the issue for emailed files, though.

 

[Griffyn]

Thanks for a partial workaround, I'll investigate if I can configure our server as s Trusted Site via tenant policy in Office 365.

If anyone has any advice about whether using a digital certificate would solve the issue for e-mail as well, I'd like to hear from you.

Cheers,
Daryl