I have somewhat of an odd question (for me, at least).
We have some private information a department would like to place on our SharePoint farm. The problem is, this is very sensitive information, and law demands that we have a 'two-stage' login process to secure the data.
Currently, it is housed using a system that:
A) you have to login to our network (windows logon screen)
B) you have to login to the application.
Our SharePoint farm has integrated authentication enabled. Meaning, once you login to your computer in the morning, you never have to login to sharepoint as it already knows your credentials.
This is a problem for us. Can we enable some sort of custom Sharepoint login?
Will this require a new web app for the site? A new site collection only perhaps?
Thanks,
~~Kolten
What you are looking for is called forms based authentication. Sharepoint 2010 uses claims based authentication and one of the providers you can configure is forms based. Meaning they provide a user name and password.
Here is a tutorial with the steps to do, it is a relatively straight forward process. just follow all the steps.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/mahesm/archive/2010/04/07/configure-forms-based-authentication-fba-with-sharepoint-2010.aspx
If you move you site out of Intranet zone, then IE will automatically ask for credential everytime.
See this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/258063
Related
Our environment is Sharepoint 2010, with a web application created (and site collection on top), using claims based authentication. The first site is using port 881. It is using integrated windows authentication. Another web application is created, extending the first application, using port 882. This site is using Forms Based Authentication, the membership provider is System.Web.Security.ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider, named admembers. I have turned off Client Integration on both sites.
When I login to the 881 site, on my corporate network, logged into the machine with the same domain account that sharepoint uses, I can open an Office file saved in a document library, and it subsequently opens in the appropriate Office application, without asking me login again. But, If I login to Sharepoint from a computer that is not on our network, or login to the computer with an account that is not a domain account, I get prompted again to login when openning an Office document. If I choose the option to save, it does not prompt, but if I choose open in the dialog window, I am forced to enter my domain credentials again.
When I login to the 882 site, which uses FBA, I experience the same problem. If I open an Office document, the appropriate Office application opens, and asks me for my credentials, by showing me a dialog window with the sign in page loaded. If I choose to save the file, then I am not prompted to login, and the file saves to a local folder.
I can't expect my users that are off site to login again everytime they open an Office document, like Work, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. I have tried numerous fixes, including disabling client integration, changing the browser handling mode (strict/permissive), changing internet explorer settings (for integrated windows authentication), changing the integrated windows authentication site to use basic authentication, even hacking the page using jquery to call the sharepoint javascript function that execute the "download a copy" function. None of them work: when choosing to "open" the Office document in the browser, the user has to login again, or just close the dialog window without logging in (as long as client integration for the zone is turned off).
I'm looking to get this accomplished using windows authentication or forms based authentication.
Help!
I found this answer in a similar post which seemed to fix the problem for me when I tested it. The gist of it is you need to deny the HTTP Verbs OPTIONS and PROPFIND in IIS. Having said this, I'm not an IIS guru and am not exactly sure what this means or what else it might affect. Can anyone else shed some light on this?
A bit of background, I'm using SharePoint 2010, on an FBA site.
You have the standard three use cases:
Employee intranet access
Employee remote access
Partner remote access
Employee intranet access
This normally always works out of the box, and it looks like it is working for you.
Employee remote access
The only way that i have seen this work (and i have tried many ways) is to get TMG or ISA. Basically ISA is setup in FORMS auth with SSL, it captures the auth details, and then passes them to the sharepoint server. (and other servers if you have them eg OWA for sharepoint mail web parts)
If you select the "Is private computer" option on the ISA login screen, then Office documents share the auth cookie and don't prompt for another login. I had so many problems, but as soon as i installed TMG, they all went away. I would not recommend any other approach now.
The added bonus of this method, is that remote employees are treated as the same account as the intranet user. The way you are setup with a seperate web application, means that they will be different accounts, so things like [checkout/modifiedby/createdby/personalisation] will be different accounts (though they look the same)
Partner remote access
This may never ever work on some clients (especially Vista), as IE needs to share the authentication with Office
If this is sharepoint 2010, try this.
Get-SPSecurityTokenServiceConfig
Look at your UseSessionCookies value in the output. If True, apply the powershell below.
$sts = Get-SPSecurityTokenServiceConfig
$sts.UseSessionCookies = $false
$sts.Update()
If UseSessionCookies is true, you will have to login to any docs u want to download...
I have enabled anonymous users on the farm and on the entire site.
I also have Windows Authentication turned on.
Whenever an anonymous user attempts to view the site, they are prompted to log in.
And they get prompted to login on every single page they view.
I would like to allow users to log in via Windows Authentication, (perhaps through a special page), but anonymous users should not get prompted to put in their password ever.
Does that mean I need to switch to forms based authentication for the entire site, or is there an option in 2010 to somehow get Windows Authentication and allowing anonymous users to live harmoniously.
It could be because some of the file is not published. For ex, if master page, CSS stylesheet or any image is unpublished, it will prompt the user for login.
Make sure everything is published and it will work.
You need to see if it is anything on this path http://server/_catalogs/masterpage/Forms/AllItems.aspx
that it is not published.
You must publish everything
May be you missed some of the configuration steps .So i wish if you take a look to the following article
SP2010 Branding Tip #9 – Turn on Anonymous Access
Regards
I assume that you are using the Publishing Site Template for the public site and hence the default.aspx (the welcome page of all the subsites) is not published so you would need to start the approval workflow publish the pages and any other assets (master page, css, images etc)
You need to do some prepwork to set the site up using two web applications, both with different authentication methods. You can't run SharePoint effectively for Windows users and anonymous (or Forms based authentication) at the same time.
Essentialy:
Create your SharePoint site for internal users using Windows Authentication
Extend the site to a new site (using the same content database) but using anonymous or forms based authentication (whichever makes sense for you)
A MSDN article can be found here on this:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff648385.aspx
You can also read Andrew Connell's blog about this (he talks about Forms based authentication but you can do the same with anonymous access)
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/HowToConfigPublishingSiteWithDualAuthProvidersAndAnonAccess.aspx
Basically you want dual authentication, Windows for one set of users and anonymous or FBA for another (and each access the site using a different URL)
Hope that helps.
I have been tasked with creating a SharePoint 2007 webpart that logs the user directly into our website (which uses forms authentication). Most likely the username and password will be same in the SharePoint account as in our website.
Ideally we would like it to be fully integrated in that the webpart looks up the SP login & password, somehow encodes that using SHA1, MD5 or similar encryption, then passes that along to our login page on the query string. However given we have little experience with SharePoint, and that it's probably impossible to programmatically access the SP username/password from a webpart we realize this isn't very likely to be possible and if so would probably require a lot of development time.
Another option would be to load a login form from the website within an iframe in the webpart, which would show the login & password first but store a "remember me" cookie after the first login, and on each subsequent load display just a button that logs them in directly using the cookie.
Has anyone done something similar before? I'm in over my head, any guidance would be much appreciated! :)
A good login system doesn't allow retrieval of passwords at all. (Forgot your password? Prove you're you and we'll reset it, send it to you, and force you to change it to something we can't see once you're back.) This way you CYA against both Angry IT Admin Guy back-dooring his way into other user accounts when he's disgruntled over coffee pot politics as well as a potential attack vector for the Internet at large to exploit.
The cookie idea is plausible. Depending on your SharePoint/other website configuration you may be able to federate your logins to a single authentication provider (using ADFS, Passport, OpenID, etc.), which would be a more elegant solution, but may not be feasible in your scenario.
If you're using SPS 2010 and your other website is based on .NET, then Windows Identity Foundation would be a option.
First, a little background: We have an intranet site based on WSS 3.0 that is hosted on a server in DOMAIN_A.LOCAL and set up to use Integrated Windows Authentication to authenticate users against Active Directory user accounts of DOMAIN_A.LOCAL.
This setup works just fine for users who are logged into Windows using an AD account from DOMAIN_A.LOCAL, but when users try to access the site from a PC logged into Windows using an AD account from a different domain (i.e. DOMAIN_B.LOCAL) the following problems occur:
The user must manually enter their credentials as DOMAIN_A\UserName rather than just UserName because otherwise, Internet Explorer automatically inserts DOMAIN_B and causes authentication to fail.
Once logged in, if the user does something that requires the browser to pass their authentication through to a client app, such as clicking on a Microsoft Office document in a document library in order to open it for editing, it appears that invalid credentials (presumably DOMAIN_B) are passed automatically, thus forcing the user to manually enter their DOMAIN_A credentials again.
My question, then is this:
Is there any way to implement a "default domain" type of behavior when using Integrated Windows Authentication (as can be done when using Basic clear text authentication) so that if a user on DOMAIN_B does not enter a domain before their user name, DOMAIN_A is inserted automatically for them?
Of course, I realize this deployment may be fatally flawed, so I am also open to suggestions for a different implementation.
In summary, the main problem stems from two different kinds of users needing to access the same content on one SharePoint site. The users in DOMAIN_A all have their own full-time workstations where they log into Windows as themselves. The users in DOMAIN_B unfortunately have to use shared computers that are logged on using generic "kiosk" type accounts that have no permissions in SharePoint -- thus the requirement that the DOMAIN_B users must provide their credentials on demand when accessing a given page in SharePoint. I would like to preserve the convenience of the Integrated Windows Authentication for the "static" users of DOMAIN_A while minimizing the amount of manual authentication that the "kiosk" users in DOMAIN_B have to endure.
DOMAIN_A.LOCAL must trust DOMAIN_B.LOCAL, otherwise users from DOMAIN_B.LOCAL will receivie a credential prompt since their DOMAIN_B.LOCAL account is unknown within DOMAIN_A.LOCAL.
Given that DOMAIN_B.LOCAL is for kisok users, you probably do not want to trust this domain.
You will need to extend the web application into a new zone and either implement forms based authentication, or use Windows Authentication with a reverse proxy such as ISA server.
I was searching the internet for SharePoint user accounts with multiple domains and came across an interesting tool called Microsoft Front End Identity Manager. Have you heard of it?
So… If your using a multi forest deployment where user accounts are distributed across two or more forests. This is often seen when two organizations merge and need to access domains from both organizations. You can use the distinguished name (ms-ds-Source-Object-DN) attribute in the user object to create an association between the user accounts. In this association one account is considered the primary account and the others are the alternates of the primary account. There is a tool called Microsoft Front End Identity Manager to create this relationship between user account objects. One feature of Microsoft Front End Identity Manager is that SharePoint server can maintain a list of alternate accounts by which the profile is identified. When you use either account to find the profile of a user, SharePoint server returns the primary account profile example (domain\username).
Probably not what you want to hear, but you may want to resort to forms based authentication.
Unfortunately if you want to retain the Microsoft Office integration (which is what it seems you want), you will have to stick with Windows Authentication. Using Forms Authentication will remove most of the features you seem keen to preserve, there is more information here.
Ideally you want to use the suggestion that Jason mentioned, which would be some sort of reverse proxy. However there would probably be a cost implication if you don't already have something like ISA server, so in reality it's probably best for the DOMAIN_B's to learn to type DOMAIN_B\ before their username.
In Moss 2007 you have the ability to set the target audience for each individual web part within a page. Is there a way to preview how the page will look to another user without logging in as that user? What I am looking for is a way for someone with full control/design permissions on a site to be able to preview how the site will be displayed to another user. Any suggestions?
I have a few test accounts that our IS department uses to preview pages, however we do not allow non-IS departamental staff to use those accounts. Those staff members only have access to their one account. So, if a user makes changes the target audience on a web part on one of their pages, right now they have no way to preview how the page will look to someone else other than asking someone else to login & watching over their shoulder. I can't give out the account information for the test accounts, nor can I create new test accounts.
Thanks!
Edit: I have the ability to preview. The problem is that other users with full control of a site can't preview the page. Here's a scenarios: In my school division each school has a site. The principal has full control of his school's site. On the landing page, he wants all the school announcements to be visible. However, some should only be visible to teaching staff, while others need to be visible to the students. He uses audience targetting but cannot preview to see at a glance that the targetting is correct. A lot of the users are not computer savy so things need to be as simple as possible. Also, that was just one scenario, there are other scenarios that are not divided by school. There are many users with full control of a site with different requirements - so it's not feasible to create test accounts for all scenarios.
First I don't think it is possible to have a preview feature if you are using NT security. Maybe it is something you can do with forms authentication but I never used it.
On that subject. I think when you are developing new features or integrating stuff on a MOSS/WSS server you need a little flexibility.
With what I see you have to following things you can do. It is surely more cost effective than developing a custom solution. I assume you are using NT Security.
User accounts : Ask your domain administrator to have dedicated user accounts to play with.
Virtual Machines : Ask to have some virual machines to be able to play with that server combined with tests accounts
Sandboxed environment : Ask your IT dept to create a sandboxed MOSS environment to have to possibility to replicate your actual MOSS environment and create custom user scenarios.
Edit: After re-reading the question I released that you want the users to be able to preview a page. I think you will need to look into writing a preview control that uses Impersonation to load the page. Not sure how feasible this is, but surely someone has created a preview feature. Sounds like a pretty common scenario to me.
Old Answer:
Could you not fire up a non MS browser such as Firefox, which will prompt for the username and password.
You can then just clear the session cookies to be prompted to log in as someone else.
This is the technique I used for an ASP.Net site that used authentication against the domain in a similar manner to SharePoint.
Alternatively, you can create a control/webpart that hooks into the audiences for the site and displays the audience membership to the user (maybe from the GetMembership call). This does not preview the site, but it will give your editors a heads up on who is in each audience. Something that will help them get the audiences correct.
We have made a similar webpart for security group membership.
I think there are two approaches you can take:
Do make use of test accounts to preview the pages. You can ease the "pain" to log in as another user by making use of the RUNAS command (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490994.aspx). So it's possible to just create a shortcut on the desktop that opens a browser making use of another account's credentials. Only that browser instance will work with the test account.
Make a copy (or more copies) of the page that you want to preview, store it in a secured site (so it's only accessible for the principal for example), and tweak the Audience Targetting properties of the web parts on that page/pages.
For previewing target audiences only, the only way to do it is to create a target audience that runs based on a properties in the SSP User Profile Properties.
You can then have a control that allows the editor to change the value stored thier profile, re-compile the profiles and voila (for some description of voila) the user will have change thier audience targetting values to something else.
This would need quite a bit of coding and some thought put into the rules for the audience targetting.
At the end of the day, the most cost effective way is to push back to your infrastructure guys for an account solution that will allow you to have an "reader" account people can use for this function.