Following my groups-related diversions over the last few days, I'm back on SharePoint Blank Mailbag duty today. Kudos to Joe for asking a question that I'd been wondering myself, but hadn't yet taken the time to investigate on my own. Joe's question came in as a response to my Adding a My Calendar Web Part post, and relates to the annoying login prompt that both he and I see every time our respective My Sites attempt to load the My Calendar Web Part. Joe asks:
On my My Site, the first time I go there every day it asks me to authenticate for the calendar. Is there a way to let it remember my user name / password? When I go to a SharePoint page,it doesn't ask for a user name /password.
I spent some time researching this question via Google today, but before I reveal my findings, here's a fun, if slightly disconcerting fact: One of my own SharePoint Blank blogs was first in the search results that came back. Crazy, huh?
The good news is that it looks like I've found a solution for Joe. The solution I'm about to describe certainly proved to be a magic bullet to banish the login prompt on my own My Site, so I'm hopeful that the same will hold true for Joe and for anyone else who may be wondering how to banish the prompt from their experience.
Props to Matt Ranlett and Brendon Schwartz, whose Windows IT Pro article, Integrate SharePoint into your Exchange Environment offered the following insight and advice:
This behavior occurs because all the personalized Exchange Web Parts are basically Page Viewer Web Parts with some specific formatting applied. Finally, when you add the Exchange Web Parts to a SharePoint site, be sure to add your Exchange server's OWA URL to the trusted Local Intranet sites on the client machines. Doing so helps prevent multiple logon prompts.
Props are also due to Brett, who patiently walked me through the process of how I could add our Exchange server's OWA (which stands for Outlook Web Access, by the way) URL to the trusted Local Intranet sites on my machine. This was the process for me (running IE on Vista), so your own process may differ slightly, but just navigate to your Internet Options (aka, Internet Properties), choose the Security tab, select the Local intranet icon, and then click the Sites button:
On the resulting Local intranet popup, click the Advanced button:
The resulting popup will provide an input field to add your OWA URL. If you happen to know the URL you use to access Outlook Webmail, that's the one. If you don't know this URL, your Sys Admin should be able to provide it. Type your OWA URL into the provided input field, click Add, then Close:
With one final caveat, that should be all you need to do to rid yourself of the pesky login prompt. Here's the caveat: With "www" preceding my OWA URL in the input above, I was still getting the login prompt on my My Site, but once I removed the www from the URL, the login prompt was gone, baby, gone.
Posted
Nov 20 2008, 05:37 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Bamboo Nation's de facto managing editor and, while he has learned much about SharePoint in his first year, he gleefully awaits the release of SharePoint 2010, and the reset button that release will represent for SharePoint Blank.