How can i force IE to launch a certain application to open content from a link?

i'd like to know if there is someway to 开发者_C百科force IE to open the content of a link with certain program, instead of showing the save/open prompt or being shown inside the browser (.jpg's).

the links have this form:

a href="http://server/folder/myDoc.doc" target="_blank" type="application/msword"

I'm trying to accomplish this for .xls, .jpg, ,bmp and .doc files mainly. But i don't know where to start, i've been researching on mime-types and content-type but don't know exactly where to start from.

The environment is an intra network if that might help.

Any help would be gretly appreciated!

P.S. this is also my first question in SO so if you have any suggestions to improve the readability of the question, that would be appreciated too.

Regards! JMHP

It does help that it's an intranet, because you will need to configure the PC's you want this to work on. The server can only tell the browser what type a given content has, but the browser will still determine itself (in collaboration with the OS) how to show, save or open that content. There is no way to control that from the server.

You can however configure IE (or Windows actually) to open certain content in specific applications. You can start by reading this knowledgebase article that tells you how to specify which application must be used to open specific file types.