MIME Types for Office 2007

We are hosting Microsoft Office documents in our web servers. To have the web servers serve these documents properly in client browsers we had to add them as MIME types.

In Apache we updated the file mime.types located in the /conf/ folder, and added the following lines:

application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12 docm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document docx
application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12 dotm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template dotx
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.template.macroEnabled.12 potm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template potx
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.addin.macroEnabled.12 ppam
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slideshow.macroEnabled.12 ppsm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow ppsx
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.12 pptm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation pptx
application/vnd.ms-excel.addin.macroEnabled.12 xlam
application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12 xlsb
application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12 xlsm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet xlsx
application/vnd.ms-excel.template.macroEnabled.12 xltm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template xltx

In Microsoft IIS we did so by opening the Internet Information Service (IIS) Manager, right-clicking on the “local computer” and selecting properties, and then opening up the MIME Types. Then added the above MIME types one at a time.

The web server needs to be restarted after these changes.

We have a runtime application installed on WebSphere Application Server (WAS) that serves some of our web pages. We had to reconfigure WAS as well and add these MIME types. To do so we added them to the virtual host(s) serving those web pages. In WebSphere Admin Console this can be found in Environment > Virtual Hosts.  Then select the proper virtual host from the list and then MIME Types from the “Additional Properties” on the right-hand navigation. MIME types need to be added one at a time.

One of the symptoms that led to adding these MIME types was that in IE links to Microsoft Office 2007 documents were recognized as zip files.