Forcing the DIP to load when a Word Document loads from SharePoint

I was working on a project and I had custom content types defined in a feature. These content types had document templates, and I wanted to control the Document Information Panel (DIP) when a document is opened in Word.

The following code snippet takes an SPContentType object and adds a custom XSN element to the content types XmlDocuments collection. Setting the openByDefault value to “True” will force the DIP to open when the document loads. I use a FeatureReceiver to run this code against a newly provisioned Content Type.

public static void ConfigureContentTypes(SPContentType ct)

{

    XmlDocument doc = GetCustomXsnDocument();

    ct.XmlDocuments.Add(doc);

    ct.Update(true);

}

private static XmlDocument GetCustomXsnDocument()

{

    XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();

    string xml = "<customXsn xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/metadata/customXsn\"><xsnLocation></xsnLocation><cached>True</cached><openByDefault>True</openByDefault><xsnScope></xsnScope></customXsn>";

    doc.LoadXml(xml);

    return doc;

}

You can find information about the child CustomXsn elements on this MSDN link: Content Type Document Information Panel Schema

Hope this helps.