Adobe FlashPaper becomes another casualty of Internet Explorer 7 security settings

One nice bonus feature of Macromedia Contribute (now Adobe Contribute) was a tool called FlashPaper which let you quickly and easily convert Microsoft Office documents into Adobe PDF files and/or Macromedia Flash-based files. You could post these converted documents on a web site and feel confident that users could access them with either Adobe Acrobat Reader or Macromedia's Flash player program.

Then, along comes Internet Explorer 7, and suddenly the files that were convert into the Flashpaper files fail to even load, and the only clue is a vague Javascript error to the effect of "object expected." Yeah, I was sort of expecting the Flashpaper document to load too, so thanks for the helpful message!

After lots of Google-Fu, I found a solution that is simple-- but tedious and inconvenient. You must go into Internet Explorer's Security settings and add the web server where the Flashpaper document resides to the "Trusted Sites" zone. That's right-- every time you stumble across a web server that uses Flashpaper files, you'll need to add that web site to your "trusted sites zone" list.

Security: 1, Convenience: 0