Unblocking Document Templates (including using powershell)

When distributing document templates files, network policies can cause documents to be marked as blocked having come from another computer.

You may receive a "Switch to" error or an Error 5981 when producing documents.

Looking at the particular document template and investigating the file properties of the template may indicate the issue:

Unblock before you unzip

If you are unzipping a merge template file, first unblock the zip file before you unzip. This will unblock all the unzipped files.

How to unblock a file

If you have unzipped and installed the templates and then found templates are blocked you can run the below powershell command to unblock all blocked templates in your templates folder.

To Run powershell you will need to be logged in as an administrator.

1. Run powershell

2. type in the powershell window

gci -s "C:\Data\MTDistributed" | Unblock-File       

*(You will need to replace C:\Data\MTDistributed with the path to your to where the document templates are stored)

Files are now unblocked

Additional info on how to unblock using powershell

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/2012/09/14/easily-unblock-all-files-in-a-directory-using-powershell

Note

1. It may make it easier to type the command in notepad before copying to power shell.
2. Make sure any document templates aren't open.

3. You may also use the following command line 

for /f "tokens=*" %f in ('dir /s /b *.*') do echo.>"%f":Zone.Identifier