In a post made by Jason Jones last year in his blog, he noted that he had been having problems accessing Office documents from his Vista computer when connecting to SharePoint sites. After logging into the SharePoint site, he found that he needed to log in again when accessing a document in a SharePoint document library. This was in spite of the fact that he had configure ISA to use persistent cookies.

Today we found out the answer! The answer comes from Gershon Levitz, who is on the TMG Firewall Scenario and System Test Team:

==================================

When a user has logged in to a published MOSS site and the user clicks on an Office document and persistent cookies have been configured in ISA, the user should not be prompted for their user name and password. However when running Vista the user will be prompted for their user name and password again.

Cause:

By default IE7 on Vista stores the persistent cookies in a protected store and that store is not available to other processes. If the user opens a second Word document they will not prompted for their password as Word now has a access to a persistent cookie it received when the first Word document was opened.

Workaround:

Add the public MOSS  site to the Trusted sites list in IE (on the user’s computer) and the user should no longer be prompted for their password a second time.

==================================

Great work Gershon!! Both Jason and me, and the rest of the ISA/TMG firewall community appreciate the help!

Tom

Thomas W Shinder, M.D., MCSE
Sr. Consultant / Technical Writer

Prowess Consulting www.prowessconsulting.com
PROWESS CONSULTING | Microsoft Forefront Security Specialist
Email: tshinder@isaserver.org
MVP — Forefront Edge Security (ISA/TMG/IAG)