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Trade 2007 OWA Virtual Directory Authentication Problems ,Office Home And Student
November three, 2009 by james.


I ran into an intriguing concern a couple of weeks in the past with Outlook World wide web Access authentication.  A good pal of mine (who shall stay nameless) referred to as me to acquire some assist acquiring OWA working appropriately on Trade 2007.
 After some testing and questioning, I found that they tried to rename the OWA virtual directory to Exchange with no deleting the present Trade virtual directory.  Action one was to persuade them it had been less complicated to have their consumers to sort the new URL than re-purpose the Trade virtual directory.
 Once we resolved that concern, we commenced operating on getting the OWA virtual directory up and operating.  We kept obtaining a 401 error, which truly didn’t make sense since the OWA virtual directory was set in Trade to employ Forms-Based Authentication.  So in the interest of time, we decided to delete and recreate the OWA virtual directory.  Same error message.
I commenced digging into IIS Manager,Windows 7 Key, 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 net.config file.  Turns out the web.config file had the authentication kind set to Forms-Based, and for some reason, the GUI change was not being written to the world wide web.config file.  We edited the web.config file manually to use Windows Authentication, and it started out working.
 Right about now,Office 2007 Professional, 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,Office Ultimate 2007 Key, 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, and Linux/Unix behind, but I was apparently wrong.
2.  For forms-based OWA authentication to work,Office Standard 2010, 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 less difficult to accept defaults and retrain users than it is to decide you don’t like Microsoft’s changes and set things up so the users don’t notice as many changes.
 Hope this helps;
James


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