MS Office panel login disables Office!

[sacco]

Once the M$ Office plugin has been installed it demands a user name and password relentlessly: a user who has either forgotten her password or does not want to login to Alfresco has no way at all to escape the Login Window!  More to the point, a developer who wishes to change his URLs is forced to login first to the repository he does not want to see.

Selecting 'Cancel' simply leads to the Login window being redrawn.

Entering wrong data appears to offer the choice of 'Retry' or 'Cancel' but both options identically return to the Login box.

The only way out is to kill  WINWORD.EXE  from the task manager.

The only way back into Office would appear to be to uninstall the plugin.

[mikeh]

Hi,

Sounds like a repeat of this problem: http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?t=7755

If you're stuck in this situation and you need to update the config, you can use regedit to manually update here:

HKCU/Software/Alfresco/Office2003‍

Also, the add-in won't activate automatically unless you're running with a really early version, so Word will never become "disabled".

Thanks
Mike

[sacco]

OK

I've uninstalled, killed the hive in the Registry, and re-installed with the latest working version available: the latest version on the 'Nightly Build server'.  The files inside the zip are dated 19 July.

Now, I don't want to store my username because I need to test as different users at the moment (and I'd also like to try without WebDAV, as there seem to be some problems floating around there too at the moment: in particular, the plug-in is failng to recognise when files come from the repository, but there's another thread about that).

So enter the Web URL and CIFS path, and try to save them: the plug-in goes into a tight loop repeatedly trying and failing to authenticate.

[mikeh]

The latest code is actually in the v2.1 Enterprise branch - we haven't merged across to HEAD yet, bu tthis will happen in the next week or so.

Also, the WebDAV path is actually mandatory (the code doesn't enforce it however, which is a known bug) - it will be removed as a configurable option in a future release.

I suspect you're getting problems with CIFS authentication caching with Windows. This is reproducible outside the context of the add-in - you may have seen the Windows error:

Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed. Disconnect all previous connections to the server or shared resource and try again.

when you try to connect to separate shares on a server with different credentials.

You can try deleting the connection using "net use /d" in a command prompt - but I think you're going to always be open to caching problems.


Mike

[dhoechst]

I've run into a similar problem. I can't get the Office plugin to connect. It gets stuck in the endless loop. I've set up Alfresco to use NTLM authentication which works when I login in using any web browser, CIFS, and FTP. I am certain I am entering my username and password correctly in the Office plugin as well as entered the correct URLs and CIFS address.

What can I look for to get authentication to work?

[schneika]

The actual versions of the office-addins in the nightlybuilds seems to have fixed this bug (endless login-loop).