Matthew McDermott

Matthew is a principal consultant for Catapult Systems. A Microsoft MVP (SharePoint Server), Matthew blogs about SharePoint and Microsoft technologies related to collaboration, web content management and productivity.

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Vista prompt me no more!

Ever since moving to Vista and Office 2007 and MOSS everyone I know with this same configuration has complained about the constant prompting in Office 2007. Here is the scenario and the fix as detailed by one of our AWSOME Desktop Support Engineers at Catapult, Greg (Awesome-O) Tate:

What’s the difference?

I found a fix for the annoying Vista prompts in SharePoint, and both work well on domain computers connected internally and externally. We are still getting many help desk requests for credential prompts when accessing Office files stored in a SharePoint document library. There are many blog posts on this topic, but the root of the problem boils down to an improvement in the security design in the way Vista uses its newly-revamped WebDAV protocol (which is a set of extensions to HTTP that allows you to work with files on a server through the Internet). See references below for more information.

To create the problem:

1. While logged in to a Windows 6 system (Vista or Server 2008), store an Office document in a document library.

2. Attempt to open this document from SharePoint.

3. You should receive a prompt to enter your credentials.

I was able to test this situation by creating a new blank Excel file and storing it to my document library on my personal site. I tested with RMS and without RMS and both cases gave me a prompt. I also restricted management permissions in SharePoint as well as defaulted back to the normal inheritance values and received the prompts in both cases.

To remedy the problem:

Force Windows to forward user authentication to a specific list of servers. Open regedit. Navigate to the following subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters

Create a new Multi-String value called AuthForwardServerList and give it a value of http://*.yourcompany.com.

Then restart the WebClient service.

Here is an example batch file:

@echo off

reg add HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters /v AuthForwardServerList /t REG_MULTI_SZ /d http://*.company.com"\0"https://*.company.com /f

net stop webclient

net start webclient

References:

Vista registry fix: http://www.nilsskog.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=25

Thanks Awesome-O! I guess I am the last to know about this fix.

Posted by Matthew McDermott on Wednesday, 4 Feb 2009 03:04

3 Comments | Filed under: Administration, Office 2007, SharePoint 2007, People who Rock

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Comments

On 15 May 2009 11:04, Terry Varley said:

Hello, I am having the credentials logon prompt when accessing Office documents via Windows XP, IE7. Would this registry fix work for that situation? Thanks. Terry

On 16 May 2009 09:39, Matthew said:

Terry, Since it it a client change it would be easy to test, but I don't know if this is your solution. Have you confirmed that your IE zone settings are correct?

On 30 Nov 2009 04:38, Vincen Watson said:

Thank you for this information. I have been looking for a fix for this problem for years now and this is something that finally works. I have used it on both Vista and Windows 7 to fix prompting problems when attempting to publish a speadsheet to Excel Services, as well as the normal opening of documents. Great work.