Wednesday, August 31, 2011

SharePoint 2010 Authentication Prompts in Document Library

SharePoint 2010 is an incredible product however, it is a beast. There are so many moving parts and nothing is really "simple." One of the things I recently ran across was a lot of authentication prompts and security warnings when users would open a document in a document library or save to a document library. This totally ruins the user experience. They're already leery of the application and if you make them authenticate all the time, they'll hate you. In addition, you don't want to use the "Remember Password" box because when their password changes, they'll be screwed.

I had a hard time finding a concise solution to solve this problem, so here is what I used and had the best success with:
  1. Add your site to the Trusted Sites Internet Zone.
  2. Go to Internet Options - Security - Highlight the Trusted Sites Check Mark - click on custom level - scroll to the bottom and in the user authentication section select "Automatic logon with current username and password."
  3. This can be done via group policy by going to:  User Configuration - Policies - Administrative Templates - Windows Components - Internet Explorer - Internet Control Panel - Security Page - Trusted Sites Zone. From here find "Logon Options" and enable it. Pick the "Automatic logon with current username and password option."
This will get rid of most of the prompts however, there is one more change you need to make if you're getting prompts when users are saving a new document up to a document library:
  1. The changes are in reference to this KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943280
  2. You need to adjust the AuthForwardServerList to include your URL. You can use a * if you want. Make sure you use the full URL like https://*.domain.com
  3. This can also be done via group policy by following this post: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010setup/thread/b26d9599-9a70-4f44-b19d-08b3a42669f2/
  4. One thing to note from that link that the author does not tell you, you have to modify this GPO registry item so that it is set to CREATE since it is a NEW reg key:


3 comments:

Unknown said...

Sorry but this doesn't work. It still prompts for authentication in Word and Excel every time you open a file. This seems to be an Office issue however, as PDF files just open right up in Acrobat.

Craig said...

Double check all the settings I noted. We got it to work for office documents with these settings.

Nagendra said...

Even after following the above instruction, still we are getting multiple prompts while using "Save As" to create a copy of the document in sharepoint. Is there any thing else we can try?