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Exchange 2007 OWA Virtual Directory Authentication Issues
November three, 2009 by james.


I ran into an exciting issue several weeks in the past with Outlook Web Access authentication.  An excellent buddy of mine (who shall continue being nameless) called me to acquire some support getting OWA operating effectively on Exchange 2007.
 After some testing and questioning,Office Professional 2007, I discovered that they attempted to rename the OWA virtual directory to Exchange without having deleting the present Exchange virtual directory.  Step 1 was to convince them it had been less difficult to obtain their users to sort the brand new URL than re-purpose the Trade virtual directory.
 Once we resolved that concern, we began working on finding the OWA virtual directory up and operating.  We stored finding a 401 error,Office 2010 Professional, which genuinely didn’t make sense since the OWA virtual directory was set in Trade to employ Forms-Based Authentication.  So in the interest of time,Office Standard 2007 Key, we decided to delete and recreate the OWA virtual directory.  Same error message.
I commenced digging into IIS Manager,Genuine Office 2010, and discovered that the OWA virtual directory was set to Forms-Based Authentication.  So, tried changing it through the GUI to Windows.  It just reset itself back to Forms-Based. 
So I commenced digging into the web.config file.  Turns out the world wide web.config file had the authentication kind set to Forms-Based, and for some reason, the GUI change was not being written to the net.config file.  We edited the net.config file manually to use Windows Authentication, and it started out functioning.
 Right about now, you are probably saying “Huh?”  That’s pretty much what I said too.  Here’s a quick summation of the lessons learned:
1.  With IIS 7 and IIS 7.5, it pretty much doesn’t matter if have a GUI, to do real work, you are going to have to edit text (XML) files. I thought we gave that up when we left DOS, Novell,Office Home And Student 2010 Key, and Linux/Unix behind, but I was apparently wrong.
2.  For forms-based OWA authentication to work, the virtual directory has to be set to use Windows Authentication.  (That one left me scratching my head for a while….)
3.  It is much easier to accept defaults and retrain consumers than it is to decide you don’t like Microsoft’s changes and set things up so the consumers don’t notice as many changes.
 Hope this helps;
James


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