Yesterday morning & the evening before I spent some time helping a user upload content to a research blog. The site was rejecting his PowerPoint and Word files, first because they were too big, and then because they were a non-approved file type.
To fix the upload issue, I had to adjust maximum allowed upload sizes in two places in my php.ini: the max_post (how much data can be allowed in any POST transaction) and max_upload (how big an individual file can be) variables. Helpfully, Wordpress’s error message changed to reflect the new parameters that weren’t being met–allowable file types for upload.
To fix that issue, I snagged Peter Westwood’s mime-config plugin for Wordpress, making the change suggested in this thread to keep the plugin from appearing in regular users’ Options tab. I wish there was a global solution, but none of the discussions I could find online suggested a way to do so besides hacking core WordPress files–and even then it was a slightly more complicated endeavor for MU than for regular WordPress. So now I can allow non-default file types to be allowed on a per-blog basis, which is fine for now. I probably should have suggested Swem Library’s D-Space as a document repository, but one reason for it not to occur to me immediately is that I’m not familiar with it yet. Users needing to ask for permission to upload Office documents will serve as a tickler for me to do so as soon as I get the opportunity.