I think it can still be done, But it will have to be read via shell.application.
Or perhaps via file type and accessed via that apps COM interface (but that should give read and write.
But I'm more of a systems admin and a prog developer... COM is way too much like magic for me to figure out.
The origin of the problem is two-fold. The first is security... some of our legal dept and administration is concerned about sending info (metadata) out to the public. The second is that after DL'ing some documents/files the filenames are hosed, but the matadata has the accurate info and I'd too lazy to fix them by hand.
