[Possible should be in a SharePoint forum, not entirely sure.]

Hey People,

this MSDN article is still the only reference I can find to this problem, so I thought I'd raise it again, given that it impacts SharePoint 2013 users.

In my case, it's SharePoint 2010 (on prem) and Office 2010, but I've done a quick test in SP2013 [it's the same] and SharePoint Online (O365) [it's OK].

If you create a document from within SharePoint (I've only checked Word), you will end up with a reference to the creating temlplate inside the DOCX file.

This reference causes the document to "phone home" every time it is opened, which may not be ideal if:

1) user does not have permission to access the original site/document library

2) user is opening the document from a network that does not have access to the original SharePoint server

3) you don't want to reveal your internal server names/aliases/site paths/etc to the person you are sending the document to.

Note: if the user does not have permissions to the original server/site/doclib, they will get a login prompt when they open the document. The login can be cancelled and the user will still be able to view the document.

If you know about unpacking DOCX files, the offending file is word\_rels\settings.xml.rels

If the only reference in there is to the template, you can safely delete this file and repackage the DOCX.

I haven't attempted to use the various metadata stripping tools out there to see if they remove it.

I'm somewhat surprised more people aren't seeing this.  I'm even surprised it doesn't turn up at my office more, but then I guess most people will create the document in Word/Excel/PowerPoint and then save to SharePoint, rather than using SharePoint's own New Document functionality.

Anyone else seen/experimented with this further?

• Edited by Craig Humphrey 3 hours 40 minutes ago