How do I prevent the ProxyAV from blocking MS Office 2007 documents?

Products

• ProxyAV Software - AVOS

Issue/Introduction

The ProxyAV appliance blocks Windows 2007 documents with extension:
Word - .DOCX, .DOTX, .DOTM, .DOTM
Excel - .XLSM, .XLTX, .XLTM, .XLSX, .XLSB, .XLAM
Powerpoint - .PPTX, .PPTM, .POTX, .POTM, .PPAM, .PPSX, .PPSM, .SLDX, .
 

Although MS Office documents extension with .DOC, .XLS, .PPT, .VSD  and other MS Office 2000/2003 documents are served / scanned, the file extensions listed above are blocked.

 

Resolution

Documents, templates, worksheets, and presentations that are created in the Office 2007 use XML standards and are saved with new file-name extensions with an x or an m. For example, a Word document uses the .docx extension, instead of the .doc extension that was used in earlier versions of MS Office.

• The x signifies an XML file with no macros.
• The m signifies an XML file that contains macros.

The .docx files are designed to make document contents accessible, therefore the text is saved as plain text files and the embedded images are stored as individual image files within the DOCX file. In order to explore the contents of a .docx file manually, you must rename the ".docx" extension to ".zip" and then decompress the resulting file with any zip decompression utility.

To manage scanning of .xml and .zip files on the ProxyAV Management console, navigate to  Antivirus  > Scanning Behavior > Policy for file types, and opt to scan or not scan files with the .XML extension and .ZIP extension.