UNC links in uploaded documents are changed

Question

Environment: WSS 3.0 SP2 running on Server 2008 Standard R2

We recently have been experiencing an issue whereby a Word or Excel doc containing links to other files on a network share gets uploaded into a document list, after which, the links in the document get changed.

For example, a document contains links to other files on \\Server1\Share1\Docs. When I upload this file to the document list on the SharePoint site and open it, the links have been changed to http://site.domain.com/docs. Therefore, the files cannot be found when you click the links.

The odd part is, this worked just fine before the file server was upgraded from Server 2003 to 2008. (Why this would have any effect, I don't understand)

So far, the Microsoft SharePoint support engineer can't even figure it out. Anyone ever seen this before? If so, what causes it? Any advice you could give would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

It would amaze me if a Microsoft support engineer cannot fix this. This seems to be a classic case of misconfigured or missing AlterNet Access Mappings: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261814(v=office.12).aspx

Answer 2

It turns out that the only problem was that the hyperlinks in the documents that exhibited the problem were added with a relative path to the source files. Once I updated a couple with the full UNC path to the file on the file share, everything worked as usual. I pointed this out to the support engineer, who confirmed my finding. Much to the chagrin of the users of the document library in question, they'll either have to update their document hyperlinks, or leave the documents on the file server. There doesn't appear to be any way to force SharePoint to resolve a relative path to a file. –