Link from web publication to local documents

When the 2c8 web publication is placed on a web server (which is what we recommend) and there are links to local documents, the security policies of a web browser will block users from these documents. This is because websites on the internet should generally not be allowed to access a user’s local document on the computer.

Local documents are in this context both files on the computer's local hard drive and files on network drives that are accessed either by mapped letters (e.g. H:) or by a UNC path such as \\NAS\public\file.pdf.

Our recommendation for solving this problem is to make sure the documents can be reached through a web server so that the document links start with https:// and not with file://. Using a document management software is preferred since this in addition to https-links will give the benefits of document versioning and access control.

If any of the web browsers Internet Explorer or Edge is used there is a temporary solution by adding the address of the website where the 2c8 web publish is placed to “Trusted sites”. If used, this solution should be implemented by the IT department globally and automatically for all users. Our long-term recommendation is still that the documents should be reached through a web server.

For other web browsers such as Chrome and Firefox only more technically complicated and non-scalable solutions are available, and these are not solutions we recommend.