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SharePoint Filenames Issue
14 May 2009Today I came across an issue in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (a.k.a. MOSS). I was trying to upload some Microsoft PowerPoint slides into a slide library in a My Site and everything had gone fine with the first presentation, but the second one I tried came up with an error:
As you can see this is not a useful message as there’s simply no indication of why the failure occurred.
After a couple of minutes trawling the web I came across a TechNet article that suggested using explorer and uploading using WebDav might overcome this. I published the slides to a local folder and set them copying to the library through explorer. Unfortunately this didn’t work either.
Another meaningless message and still no further towards resolving the issue.
After another five minutes of further hands on and Internet free investigation I found the cause of the issue. Apparently SharePoint is a bit particular about file names. If a file name has two successive dots / periods in it, then it won’t allow you to upload it. I checked this for document and image libraries too. All libraries are lists in SharePoint, so I’m reasonably confident that it’s an issue across the board.
So if you have a file named Dot2..dot.doc for example would give you
the issue but Dot2.dot.doc would work just fine. So if you see an
error like those shown above, check your filename and rename it if it
has the two successive dots.
