Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Since using Vista at Microsoft I've been victim to more credential prompts in the past year than I have in my life. It really drives me nuts and I had no idea why.
There are two kinds of prompts I see:
Now in a domain controlled environment you should never see prompts at all unless you don't have access to a resource. Windows takes care of this via Single Signon etc.
Well FINALLY I see David Rasmussen posted an explanation of issue #1, with a link to the SharePoint team blog explaining the issue. Sadly our IT department had no clue about this when I would call them.
The issue is that you must have "Automatically Detect Settings" enabled in your proxy configuration in IE. The problem is that in Hotmail we use some custom proxy servers to communicate with our labs and you need to disable "Automatically Detect Settings" to get to work. I can't tell you how many times I go to that dammed dialog to configure proxy settings. The crazy thing about this behavior is that if you just hit cancel on the credential dialog the document would still open:
With Office 2007 running on Windows Vista, opening an Office document hosted on a SharePoint (i.e. WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007) site results in a prompt for login credentials even if the user is already logged on with an account that has access to the document. Canceling the credential prompt may still (but not always) allow the document to open in read-only mode.
And of course if you wanted to edit the doc you were out of luck.
Issue #2 is related to some configuration issues in our DOMAIN environment that have been addressed, but nasty to track down. We all suffered a lot in the interim (entering credentials as many times as > 100 a day).
Another weirdo Vista problem solved. This is why I hate new Operating Systems. Too many regressions that are very hard to understand let alone get a fix.