How to Disable Property Promotion In WSS

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I was working with a customer recently that has a business need to disable property promotion/demotion in WSS/MOSS.  If you don’t know what property promotion is, it’s the functionality in WSS that pulls the document metadata (e.g. Title, Subject, etc) from Office 2003/2007 documents during upload and sets those values to their corresponding column in WSS.  Property demotion is just the opposite, if you update the document properties (like Title) via the WSS UI, that property value is written back to the file.  Basically, with property promotion/demotion, we keep the properties in the document and in WSS in sync.

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Disabling property promotion and demotion is very easy.  The SPWeb object has a ParserEnabled property, which enables or disables this functionality.  Using the below PowerShell sample script, we can turn off this functionality at the web level.

PS C:\>[system.reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")

PS C:\> $site = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("https://mossweb/sites/test")

PS C:\> $site.RootWeb.ParserEnabled = $false

PS C:\> $site.RootWeb.ParserEnabled

False

PS C:\> $site.RootWeb.Update()

To enable document property promotion, just set the ParserEnabled property to true:

PS C:\Users\administrator.LAB> $site.RootWeb.ParserEnabled = $true

PS C:\Users\administrator.LAB> $site.RootWeb.Update()

 

If you want to learn more about document property promotion, see this article on MSDN:

Document Parser Processing: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa543341.aspx