Prevent Microsoft Office from prompting users for credentials

If you're running Windows Vista and you try to open a Microsoft Office 2007 document from a SharePoint 2007 site, you may be prompted for your user credentials every time. This can be extremely annoying and frustrating for clients who use SharePoint as there primary document management system. You'd think you could get around this problem simply by adding the sharepoint url to your list of Trusted Sites, or Intranet Sites in IE, but for many, this is not the case. If your SharePoint url contains a period (ex: http://sharepoint.myorg/, https://sharepoint.myorg.com/, etc), Vista takes the liberty of assuming that it is an Internet site, and not part of the local intranet.

And you know what happens when you assume.... Well, normally you'd make an ass out of you and me, but in Vista's case, you just piss off a lot of people.

Luckily, Microsoft has acknowledged this as being a bug, and has released a fix. Unfortunately, this is a client side fix, so it requires updating all client machines. A pain yes, but as of now, it is the only solution I have found to actually work.


Read the full KB article here:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=943280

If you have SP1 installed, all that is required is to add a key into the registry at the following location:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters

Add a new Multi-String Value key.
Add your site as the key's value.
Reset the Web Client service
Et Voila! (That's French for 'Tadaa' - See, your learning so much!)

If this does not work, make sure your site is added to the list of Intranet sites in IE.

If you do not have SP1 installed then - well you should probably install SP1.... But if that's just not an option, Microsoft has released a Hot Fix for just this problem. It can be found at the url above as part of the KB article.

Pretty straight forward. It's unfortunate that we're forced to implement such a workaround, but that's life. Life is all about repairing Microsoft's mistakes.

I kid...

Or do I?