EPiServer 5 - Office Plugin Show Stopper

Let's compare - EPiServer 4.62 is a very stable product, and has been released to many production systems. It also has had a number of updates including bug fixes and the like.

EPiServer 5 on the other hand is pretty new, and not as widely used yet. I along with another developer has been working on the first EPiServer 5.0 site in New Zealand! We will get there for sure, but there have been some hurdles along the way!

One such hurdle is the office plugin functionality. This is not new functionality, but a strange undocumented setting has caused us much pain and has been a show stopper for a couple of weeks.

Make sure that users and groups are set up in the site as you would want. By default no user or group has access to using the office plugin. To set this up requires a couple of steps, the second which is not documented and where we were having the problem.

1) Enter admin mode -> Click the config tab -> Click permissions for functions -> Click the edit button next to ‘View and publish pages from Microsoft Office add-in’. Use this page to add the users and/or groups that should be allowed to publish from office. Click the save button.
2) You should be back at the permissions for functions page. Click the option ‘Allow advanced upload of files using for example drag-and-drop’. Add into this setting the same users and groups as you did in part 1.

I am unsure what connection part 2 has to the office plugin, as the name of the setting does not really correspond. If you don't do this though the office plugin wizard will keep asking you to authenticate a few steps in and you will not be able to go any further!