I spent some time researching an interesting issue in Sharepoint 2010 today.
This involves a set of pdf documents that were stored in a document library.
We had created a page that contained links to these documents, but the behavior is consistent if you just do it directly from the document library.
What happens when I clicked on one of the document links in IE was that IE would prompt me to download the file. If I went to other website, and clicked on their Pdf it would open directly in the browser. So I wanted to figure out what was causing this.
What I found was that Microsoft only opens documents it trusts directly from document libraries, and Microsoft does not trust pdf document, and will force you to download it.
Here is how you can get around the behavior:
- Goto Central Administration
- Application Management
- Select the Web app you need to modify
- Click General Settings
- Change the Brower File handling from Strict to Permissive.
Thats it, your Acrobat document should open directly in the browser in IE now.