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Login prompt while opening Office documents on SharePoint library

This is a very common that we get authentication dialoge box while trying to edit an Office document on a SharePoint library from Internet. This happens even if you are logged in to your site using browser. It is frustrating for end user because he/she has provided credentials once before loggin in to the site and now when tried to open/edit a document (Word, Excel etc) again the credntial window pops up.

Quoting Microsoft:
"When Internet Explorer opens an Office document, the appropriate Office application is started with the path of the document. The Office application then tries to access the document directly from the server. This differs from other browsers and other file types. Most browsers download the file and call the application to open the file from the local cache. However, when this occurs, if the opened file is changed and saved, the changes are only made to the local copy and not to the server copy.

To establish the richest experience possible, the first thing that the Office application does is communicate with the server to determine the server type and what web authoring protocol is available. The application does this by making an OPTIONS request directly to the server.

As a new process accessing the server, the Office application is required to renegotiate authentication. This method is more secure than a method in which the new process uses an existing authentication that was established by the browser."

Suggested work arounds are:
- Using Forms Based Authentication (FBA) with persistent cookies
- Leave the application open
- Select "remember the password" while logging in to FBA site


Here are some articles that provide more details on this issue:
Multiple Logon while open office Document from SharePoint
http://blogs.technet.com/b/steve_chen/archive/2010/06/25/multiple-logon-while-open-office-document-from-sharepoint.aspx


Authentication requests when you open Office documents
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2019105


How to Configure Persistent Cookies on ISA 2006
http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/oshria/archive/2009/02/16/how-to-configure-persistence-cookies-in-isa-2006.aspx

Login prompt appearing when opening Office documents
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/45feb132-c304-4521-8b79-42236a829aab

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