You might find yourself presented with a message when attempting to open or edit a Microsoft Office document in a BrightWork site collection or any SharePoint site collection while using Google Chrome. This is apparent when you go to open a project task list in Microsoft Project.

“The document could not be opened for editing” when opening a document in Chrome. A Microsoft SharePoint Foundation compatible application could not be found to edit the document.”

The root cause is due to Google’s discontinuance of NPAPI support.

Background of NPAPI Support

Beginning with the release of Chrome 41.0.2272.0, Google disabled NPAPI plugins by default. This was documented in its release notes with a disclaimer that support would soon be dropped completely.

With Google’s release of Chrome 45 in late 2015, NPAPI support was discontinued. This also had an impact on other software such as Silverlight, Java, Facebook Video and other similar NPAPI bases plugins.

Next Steps and Recommendations

Because of the above mentioned, it is recommended that Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge be used to facilitate opening Microsoft Office documents in SharePoint sites. This includes BrightWork site collections.

• Here is Microsoft’s listing of Planned Browser Support for:
  • SharePoint 2013
  • SharePoint Server 2016

Other Points

It is also worth mentioning that when you use Chrome, it tends to default to downloading the Microsoft Office documents locally to your machine, rather than opening on the server.

This has an impact especially if you are using content management on SharePoint. You will not be able to create minor versions and will have to upload/download the document. Internet Explorer will open the document for editing from the server.

For this reason, I would also recommend using Internet Explorer as your default browser for SharePoint and BrightWork.

We hope that the above information is helpful. If you have additional questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to BrightWork Support.

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