Sharepoint.OpenDocuments Control Compatible with Forms Authentication?

Question

• We are using the Sharepoint.OpenDocuments.EditDocument2 ActiveX control and method.
• The method is being called from JavaScript in an IE6 client on a Windows XP SP3 client (fully patched).
• The server is running IIS6 on Windows Server 2003 SP1
• Fronting the IIS server is Tivoli Access Manager (TAM) which proxies access to the web applications sitting behind it. Similar to forms authentication, it creates a session cookie for authentication purposes, that must be present for the HTTP request to reach the IIS server.
• In front of TAM is an F5/BigIP load balancer and SSL encryption offloader, which enforces that incoming requests use the HTTPS protocol.

What is happening is that HTTP requests issued by this control do not contain any session cookies that were present in the browser. It drops the ASP.NET session cookie, the ASP.NET forms authentication cookie and the TAM cookie Because the TAM cookie is missing the request is redirected to the TAM login page, which then shows up via HTML conversion in Word or Excel.

The API documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms440037.aspx mentions nothing about security or appropriate usage scenarios for this control.

Should these controls work in an ASP.Net Forms Authentication scenario or are they only supported with Windows Authentication. If Forms Authentication is supposed to function, how do we get the control to include the necessary session cookies in its requests?

Answer 1

The answer as provided by Microsoft Support.

This control merely forwards the URL of the document being retrieved to the appropriate office application.

The office application attempts to negotiate authentication with Sharepoint Server (full version). If no Sharepoint, the Office application does a simple get on the URL.

Ultimately, this means that this control does not support authentication scenarios that rely on session cookies.