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Gavin
Asked: 2010-11-24 18:23:45 +0800 CST

Sharepoint seeking authentication when opening Word / Excel files from website

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The company I work for is using SharePoint as a CMS for it's public facing website. I recently enabled FBA (Forms Based Authentication) for the site in order to provide some user specific functionality, but this has caused a side effect with Word / Excel files when opened from the site using Office 2007 / 2010.

Some users are challenged for authentication when opening a Word / Excel document from IE (but not when they're select "save file" instead of "open file"). A window pops up behind IE / Word / Excel (so you often don't realise it's there) showing the sites login page. If the window is dismissed then the document continues to open normally.

It seems to be environmental. Most Office 2007 / 2010 users internally experience this and we've had one report externally of this happening.

Anyone know how to prevent this behaviour?

In case it's relevant: The company also has an internal SharePoint site using NTML authentication allowing internal users to edit the same content visible externally.

I originally suspected the SharePoint header added to responses may be alerting Office to check for authentication to allow extended functionality, but I remove the response header in IIS and it didn't make any difference.

sharepoint microsoft-office-2007 fba microsoft-office-2010

1 Answers

  1. I tried to open a few documents from the http://ecan.govt.nz/services/resource-consents/pages/forms-booklets.aspx#application-forms page using different browsers and the problem only occurs for Internet Explorer.

    Try setting the Enable Client Integration option to No in configuration of the Internet zone authentication provider.

    UPDATE:

    An article that may help has just been published - SharePoint 2007: Office Documents prompt for Authentication when trying to open from SharePoint site.

    This happens when Office detects that WebDAV is enabled on the server. If WebDAV is enabled then Microsoft Office also has to determine whether or not to open the document as ReadWrite or ReadOnly. SharePoint acts as its own WebDAV Server. Server 2008's WebDAV Publishing role if enabled will interfere with SharePoint’s WebDAV functionality.

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