I work in an Education Environment, and we use Web Filtering based on Active Directory groupings to block or allow certain websites for Staff and Students. For unauthenticated access, such as people using Smartphones or Tablets, we also have a list of
blocked sites. (This list is, understandably, the strictest.)
It's recently come to our attention that hyperlinks within Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2010 are responding with "Unable to open <URL>. Cannot download the information you requested". This happens to any users for whom a website is on their specific allowed
list, but would otherwise be blocked for unauthenticated users.
For example, YouTube is blocked by default, but in many establishments is allowed for staff. If a member of staff types youtube.com into the address bar in IE, it works. If they type youtube.com into Word 2010 and click on the hyperlink that's generated,
it fails with the above message. This is not how we want our system to work.
In another example, if a website is usually allowed, but blocked for a member of staff, and that person types the URL into Word and clicks on it, an IE Window opens, but then displays our "Website Blocked" message. This *is* how we want our system to
work.
So the question is, how do we get Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2010 hyperlinks to stop sending unauthenticated requests to the website in question, and returning an error if it cannot download the information, but rather open IE by default and *then* either
display the website, or a blocked message?
Thanks,
Tim.
EDIT: I undestand HLINK.DLL and URLMON.DLL might have something to do with it, but I don't know what.