Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2003 property length limitation to 256

Question

We recently upgrade to Office 2010 (from 2003) and we noticed a problem with our Sharepoint 2003 integration. (yes, 2003, long story why we haven't upgraded, but in short: a high customised implementation of Sharepoint).
We noticed that since the upgrade that whenever we use "Edit in Microsoft Word" on a document in Sharepoint and save the document again to Sharepoint, all sharepoint properties (metadata) of that document get cut off to 256 characters. This only happens
for doc files, not for docx files.
Anybody any idea how to resolve this or encountered the same problem? The metadata in those properties is very important to the workings of our Sharepoint portal so I really need more than 256 chars.

Answer 1

For earlier versions of SharePoint, this was a well known issue.  Sometimes, lengthy links can come from non-IT people creating sites, sub-sites and libraries.  As Stacy says, the fix may well end up being manual in that some of the links will
have to be shortened.  There are, however, shortcuts for this: -
Begin by using the various ENUM commands in STSADM to get a list of sites.  Identify those with large links and see how far down their site structure goes.  
You can do things such as backing up and restoring sites with different / smaller URLS and renaming subsites.  Removing spaces between words or characters is a good one to aim for as a space will turn in %20 in the URL
Think about using a utility, whether a commercial product's trial / express edition, or a CodePlex product to help restructure your environment.
Steven Andrews
SharePoint Business Analyst: LiveNation Entertainment
Blog: baron72.wordpress.com
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