MS Office Apps Randomly Asking For Credentials
Hi, We have a randomly occurring issue where Office applications (mostly Word and Excel) are showing a dialog requesting users authentication credentials for our SharePoint Farm. The strange thing is that this occurs even when the user has not opened any files from SharePoint. e.g. a user opens a file from locally on their desktop, edits the file then randomly a dialog appears for authentication to SharePoint. That file has never been stored in SharePoint or they didn't try to save it into SharePoint. The prompt will persist for up to 3-4 times but then finally disappear. It is very frustrating for users. (SharePoint Version: 2007 with Enterprise features enabled + all CU's/SP's Office Version: Professional 2007 with all SP's and latest patches from MS Update) Things I have tried: 1. Set "Log On With Current Username and Password" in Internet Explorer security settings. Result - still get randomly prompted. 2. Check the template that word documents opened from local disk are using in case the template is stored in SharePoint. Result - template is local to the machine. Any suggestions how to troubleshoot/fix this?
April 14th, 2011 10:51am

Please also edit in the information of which SharePoint product you have. Useful information would also be which versions of the Office products. (Then I can delete this post) Moderator SP 2010 "FAQ" (mainly useful links): http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/default.aspx WSS3/MOSS FAQ (FAQ and Links) http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/default.aspx Both also have links to extensive book lists and to (free) on-line chapters
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April 14th, 2011 11:34am

Can you check if the documents that you pickup randomly are downloaded from the SharePoint site? Thanks VV
April 14th, 2011 12:59pm

V284, Thank you for replying. Some documents have been opened from SharePoint on the machines in question. It does not prompt for credentials when these are opened. It happens with documents that are opened from the local hard disk on the machine which does not make sense because they should not be trying to authenticate with SharePoint. It's random and does not happen with all documents opened from the local disk. There are no links embedded in the documents that are opened from local disk. It seems like an Office issue as it happens with both Word and Excel.
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April 15th, 2011 4:13am

Do the documents have any Urls or links that are trying to access any site. Look into the documents and see if is true. Opening documents which are downloaded from sharepoint site does have this problem. If the document has been downloaded from SharePoint site onto local machine, then we can have a resolution of either adding the site to the trusted sites. It seems like it is a sharepoint site which is causing the authentication. If you have an intranet site that is being accessed at the same time,try disabling the client integration of that particular site in Central Administration and adding the site to the trusted site. Also, for that particular web app, remove the words OPTIONS in web.config. Hope this helps. Thanks VV
April 15th, 2011 11:26am

No. No urls/links embedded. Some documents are opened from Outlook as an attachment. Those documents are sent in from external contacts to our domain. Still we see a prompt for SharePoint credentials when this type of document is opened. It seems to be Office that is causing the problem. It is not a specific site or web app causing it as it happens across multiple SharePoint servers in the Farm. We see in the dialog prompt that appears the name fo the server and this is different each time. How can I clean out all settings/user passwords etc. in the cache of Office applications so that I can rule this out?
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April 20th, 2011 7:47am

I have been having the same issue. Still no resolution. It happens in all Office 201 products (Word, Excel, PPT, OneNote, etc), and the connection is to a SharePoint farm that is not part of my primary AD domain. I tried to see if it was a Favorite site or something that was tied to the back end. Its very annoying and odd.
May 6th, 2011 12:42pm

I think I have found the answer. I did a registry search for the URL of the SharePoint server that Office kept asking me about. I found a key HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-2147253334-397953702-1233284464-11550\Software\AppDataLow\Microsoft\Office\Common\Portal\PersonalSiteUrl In this key was the URL of the MySite of our testing SP2010 farm (which is not part of our Corporate AD Domain). I think that I must have allowed it to be part of the my Office profile when I went to the site the first time and since it is not part of my AD domain the credentials have to be re-prompted by Office. Give that a try. DCB
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May 6th, 2011 12:51pm

I'm having this issue also and the MS Moderators haven't been helpful, at least not as of yet. Any resolutions yet? -Dustin
June 21st, 2011 4:36pm

Had the same problem it only happened with office documents and while the sharepoint was https. It is a issue with the integrated authentication. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2018958/ My resoultion was purchasing Sharepoint 2010.
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June 23rd, 2011 3:24pm

Daniel, good information to know but it is not related to this particular issue. The article applies to Windows 2008 and 2008 R2 WebDav. Our installation of SharePoint 2007 is running on Windows 2003 server.
June 24th, 2011 12:33pm

HI, I had the similar issue in outlook andI foundthe reason for it. When I looked at the data file management I found a datasource as Sharepoint Lists. Hence whenever it was trying to sync with the site it was throwing the error. So I suggest you to check if any kind of data source related to sharepoint is configured in office installation you have or not. I also suggest you to repair your sharepoint installation to check if it works. I hope this will help you out. Thanks, Rahul Rashu
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June 25th, 2011 2:58pm

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