Not able to open a history version of an Excel workbook directly from TFS-connected SharePoint portal

Following experience comes from Nitish Nagpal.

 

Customer reported they kept getting strange error messages when trying to open Excel files from the version history in SharePoint that has a TFS connection.

Specs:

• SharePoint 2010 Foundation
• TFS 2010 (and as well 2012 on a test server)
• Office 2010  (and 2007, which does not have this error)

So for example with an Excel file connected to a TFS query and stored in SharePoint. They could open the current version without any problems with Excel 2007 and 2010 but when trying to open a previous version via the SharePoint version history, it only works for 2007. When using Excel 2010 they saw the following two error messages:

 

 

Customer tried the following (32bit versions of all programs):

• Re-register the TFSOfficeAdd-in
• Uninstall Visual Studio and Office and install Office first and then Visual Studio
• Tested on client where only Office 2010 is installed on a clean system (no previous Office versions)

 

 

REPRO STEPS

1. In Excel 2010, create an excel workbook with TFS list 

2. Save the workbook to SharePoint and make sure history management is enabled for the SharePoint list

3. Check-in a new version of workbook (any edit) to SharePoint

4. From SharePoint, get to the version history of the workbook and open the history (not current) version of workbook.

 

OBSERVED RESULTS

We will hit two TFS add-in errors (pictured see above ) when the document get opened in Excel, and it will be closed.

TF84021: Team Foundation could not create the work tiem list

TF208103: The initialization of the document to connect to Team Foundation Server was not successful. The document will close. You can try to connect gain by re-opening the document

 

WORKAROUND

Manually download the history version of file to local then open it. It only occurs you open it from SharePoint directly.