Office 2007 on Vista authentication prompts with Sharepoint docments

Under Windows Vista, sometimes when you open an Office document stored on a WSS or MOSS site, Vista keeps prompting you for user credentials and integrated security just doesn't seems to work.  This can be caused by a number of different configuration issues in your environment and sometimes you need to have all the stars aligned for it to work.

• First thing to check is make sure your Sharepoint site is working with integrated security to start with, that is you have configured either NTLM or Kerberos correctly.  So when you navigate to your Sharepoint site in Internet Explorer with your desired url, it should not prompt you for username or password.
  
  If you are having trouble here, check these items.
  
• Make sure the url you're using is in the Intranet zone and not the Internet zone.  By default on Vista, only Intranet zone does integrated security.
• Check that you are using NTLM on your WFE server.
• If you are using Kerberos, make sure SPN are configured correctly.  Check out this post from Martin Kearn on kerberos and Sharepoint.
  
• Now make sure Vista is running SP1, if not, install the hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/?id=943280 on your clients.
  
• Add AuthForwardServerList to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters in the registry.  The value in this key should be the URLs of your sharepoint stie.  Restart the WebClient or for the changes to take effect.  I've used the new group policy preference to deploy this key.

With everything configured correctly, there shouldn't be any more annoying authentication prompts from Vista when you open an Office 2007 document.

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint,Vista,Office,Authentication

OBA Composition Reference Toolkit v2

If you develop applications on the Office platform, check out the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit.  It contains some very cool demo and useful reference guides to give you a great starting point to create very powerful composition applications around office applications.

Sharepoint VSeWSS 1.1

If you are doing WSS or MOSS development, do check out the VSeWSS 1.1 release.  It provides some help to develop .WSP package right inside visual studio.  The new 1.1 release allows you to have more control over the WSP solution creation.

If you have been only using Sharepoint designer for customising WSS or MOSS or have your own scripts to generate and maintain sharepoint features, give VSeWSS 1.1 a go.  See the sharepoint team blog entry at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/02/11/announcing-the-final-release-of-vsewss-1-1-and-the-upcoming-version-1-2.aspx

Import Spreadsheet with Sharepoint error

A customer ran into a problem where he is getting "Method 'Post' of object 'IOWSPostData' failed" when trying to create a sharepoint list via importing a SpreadSheet using Excel.  There are plenty of posts on the Internet about this and the fix is to update EXPTOOWS.XLA to force a different version number.

The original macro code uses a new method in the Excel 2007 object model Application.SharePointVersion(URL).  That method is returning 0 in the customer's environment causing spreadsheet import not to work.

As it turns out, Application.SharePointVersion checks the root site for a Sharepoint site to determine the version.  Because for this particular environment setup, I do not have a valid Sharepoint site at the root, it does not return the correct version number.

The solution was to create a dummy blank sharepoint site at the root of a web site and now users can import spreadsheets and create list using spreadsheets for all sites (root and sub site).