MS Word docs open authentication popup in IE

[longinus]

Hello All

I was wondering if anyone has found a workaround to the problem when Office documents stored in alfresco (5) are opened with the direct link in IE and authentication popup is opened.

This is due to IE opening the MS Word app, which doesn't support authentication protocol used by alfresco. MS word uses Integrated Windows Authentication and our alfresco uses Kerberos. Chrome on the other hand, doesn't start MS Word application but saves the file locally instead. this would be acceptable solution to my problem with IE but struggling to achieve that.

I tried to override the mime type to confuse IE, but my alfresco core instance doesn't start up anymore (used  application/octet-stream for docx instead of application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document).

I also tried to construct doc access link in two different ways but stumbling against  limitations:

1) this link opens auth popup:

http://<hostort>/<contextRoot>/s/api/node/content/workspace/SpacesStore/<alfcmis:nodeRef>/<file name>.docx

2) link to content i took from NodeBrowser that doesnt contain file name, so you download the file with content.docx extension each time

http://<host>/<contextRoot>/s/api/node/workspace/SpacesStore/<node-uuid>/content;cm%3Acontent

Is there any way to attach a file name to this link?

When you try to save document in this case the auth popup opens. Is there a way to avoid it?

Has anyone solved the MS Office auth problem in any way?

Kind Regards

Krzysztof

[afaust · Accepted solution]

Is there a reason you are not using Alfresco Office Services to deal with the Microsoft Office integration? Trying to get this to work with the generic content download API (except for read-only view) is going to be a mess. All the differences between how the browsers open the Office apps are already handled, and saving back is supported out of the box.

Also, Alfresco with Kerberos enabled is fully compatible with MS Office on Windows with integrated authentication. Integrated authentication just means that WIndows / IE will use the best available authentication mechanism to pass your local user identity - based on your AD / client configuration, this is Kerberos (prefered / recommended by Microsoft) and legacy NTLMv2/NTLMv1.

[longinus]

Here is the documentation for it : Installing and configuring Alfresco Office Services | Alfresco Documentation