Jun 16
The Missing Link (or Reg Hack) to the SharePoint Logon Prompt Issue
David Tappan
I have been working in IT for 11+ years and have spent the last 5 years with C/D/H.
My specialties have grown over the years, and now include:
Active Directory/LDAP/Directory Synchronization, Exchange and SMTP, Office Communications Server, and SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint!
When I’m not at work, my favorite activities are gardening, skiing and spending time with my wife and 3 kids.
More about David
Articles by David Tappan
If you are running Vista and Office 2007, you have most likely experienced logon prompts while trying to open a document from your company portal, even though you are logged in with the correct user, or have selected to save your username and password. Numerous fixes or workarounds have been suggested for this problem; in fact our own Jason Sharp blogged about another workaround for this problem, and his solution works, but is, as Jason says, “weird”.
Well, it turns out that what we’ve all been struggling with is a bug, for which Microsoft released a hotfix—and then rolled the hotfix into Vista SP1! This is the final piece of the puzzle that will make all the prompts go away. If you have Vista SP1, do the following (if you don’t have Vista SP1, go get it! Or, if you insist, get the hotfix listed in the article: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=943280):
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Click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER. |
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Browse to the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters |
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Add a new Multi-String Value, and call it AuthForwardServerList
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Right-click on the new key, click Modify. |
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In the Value data box, type the URL of the server that hosts the SharePoint document library, and then click OK. You can use wildcards. Example: “*.company.com”. |
You may have to restart the WebClient service. That’s it! It works like a charm. I do have to say that I think it’s odd that Microsoft included this hotfix in SP1, but didn’t create a UI for it, so you have to edit the registry. A bug this major needs to have an easy fix built into IE settings.
This step is not a replacement for adding the server to your Trusted Sites list, and saving your credentials for it. You should still do these other things too:
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Add the sites to your Trusted Sites in Internet Explorer.
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Edit the security settings for custom sites, and set it to “Automatically logon with current username and password”
· If your computer is not in the domain (or if you want this to work on other portals not in your domain), go into Control Panel/User Accounts, select Manage my network passwords, and add stored credentials for the server. Enter one each for both a “Windows logon credential” and for “A web site or program credential”.
That’s quite a bit to have to do, I must say. In a managed environment, you can roll all these changes into an automated registry update, and fix the problem for all the users in your organization.