I am a student programmer working for an IT department at my college, and my most recent project is implementing browser compatibility for a web form my supervisor wrote using HTML and Javascript.
Everything runs fine in IE, Firefox, and Chrome, with the exception of one column. The idea is that the entries in this column are links to files on a shared drive accessible through the college's Novell network. For instance:
<a href="file\\\R:\Teams\Scholarship Guidelines\724.doc" target="_blank">724</a>
Anyone accessing this web form from a college computer should hypothetically be able to click the link and have this .doc pulled up from the shared drive. However, this is hit or miss with IE, and doesn't work at all with Firefox or Chrome.
In Firefox and Chrome, I get errors telling me that it is not allowable to load the local resource.
In IE, the link opens a new Explorer window and (sometimes) opens the corresponding Word document.
My prevailing theory is that the way it's currently implemented depends on one of IE's security holes. How could I go about doing this in a way that works without compromising security?
NOTE: I was told that uploading the files to the web server is not an option; they need to stay where they are.