Ugh. So sharepoint is microsoft’s document revision control system. Basically a pretty web interface for a file share, with some really annoying management stuff thrown in where you can’t ever find it again.

A new user came to me today saying that he was having files dissappearing from sharepoint. I figured it was one of the foolish views that seem to like to filter things away. I had known you could hit the files via either a web browser or but using my network places as sort of a file share, which uses WebDAV (likely a proprietary extension, I’m not sure.) All this gets stored in a SQL database. So I go and poke around the SQL database and find a table called ‘Docs’ which contains a couple columns for the filename (leafnode) and the path (dirname I think). I search for the ‘hidden’ files and they aren’t there anymore.

I go and poke around on his laptop again and he’s mapped a network share (ie \\server\site) instead of the webdav address (http://server/site) to a drive letter to try to pull a list of the directory tree out. He’s putting links to all of the files in excel using the unc path and not the webdav path, but here’s the clincher. Whenever he opens documents using the unc path, when he closes them, the files get deleted from the server. DELETED. Can I emphasize that more?

I left him, with the understanding that unc paths with sharepoint are bad. He sent me this thread later. Basically, yeah, there’s a bug (kb 884050), where word deletes the real copy of the file thinking it’s the temporary file. Nice. But I hit the registry key (HKLM \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Office \ 11.0 \ Common \ ProductVersion) for his box (11.0.7969.0) and check it against a list. Office 2003 SP2. It’s supposed to be fixed. Maybe they forgot to fix it in Office SBE or something? I don’t know. Man… I’m not looking forward to restoring the sharepoint database and manually merging back the missing files.

(edit) I can’t reproduce it on my machine, mapping network drives using unc paths with and without drive letters and using word. I have the same version number in my registry, but word reports 11.8106.8107 . I haven’t checked his word version yet though. also that version number doesn’t appear in my registry.