SharePoint Integrating with the 2007 Microsoft Office System

Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 users who also have the 2007 Microsoft Office system of applications installed enjoy a high level of integration between the 2007 Office system and SharePoint Products and Technologies. Many of those integration features, however, depend on Windows authentication. Without Windows authentication, some integration points do not work, and others are changed considerably. To help minimize user confusion, SharePoint Products and Technologies offer a mode in which certain menu items that require Windows authentication are removed. In the Central Administration Web site, on the Authentication Provider page, this mode is controlled via the Enable Client Integration box.

When you configure a zone to use forms authentication, the Enable Client Integration box is cleared by default. If a zone is configured in this way, the following changes occur in functionality:

• Support for remote interfaces is turned off. That includes WebDAV, SOAP, and Microsoft Office FrontPage remote procedure calls (RPC). Some functionality is not available, such as Web folders or the Web services for accessing content in that site.
• Some toolbar items no longer appear:
• New Document
• Open in Outlook
• Open In Windows Explorer
• Export to Spreadsheet
• Open with Database Program
• Explorer View option is hidden.
• Create an Access View option is hidden.
• In picture libraries, the following functionality is removed:
• Upload Multiple
• Edit Picture
• Download
• Send To
• On the Edit Control Block (ECB) menu, the drop-down menu that appears when you click items in document libraries, the following items are removed:
• Edit in Word
• Edit in Excel
• Edit in PowerPoint
• Discuss
• Connect To Outlook
• In slide libraries the following functionality is removed:
• Publish Slide
• Send to PowerPoint

Also, syncing SharePoint data with Microsoft Office Outlook no longer works.

When operating in this mode, users can still work with documents in SharePoint libraries, but they must right-click items and choose to save a copy to disk. They can then edit and update the document, and then upload it and check it back in when they are finished editing.

Some organizations might want to use forms authentication, but also require the same level of integration they get when using Windows authentication. There are a couple of possible workarounds in this scenario, but it is helpful to examine why this limitation exists.

When a user accesses a page on a site protected by forms authentication, the server looks for a valid authentication cookie. If no cookie is found, or if the cookie is not valid, the server redirects the browser to the logon page by using an HTTP 302 status code. At this page, the user is allowed to authenticate by using his or her credentials. After the credentials are validated, the server creates a valid authentication cookie and sends it back to the browser, with the originally requested page. The browser keeps the cookie in memory and sends it back to the server with every subsequent request to that Web server. With each request, the server checks the validity of the cookie to ensure that it is good (that it has not expired or been tampered with), and then processes the request.

Because the authentication cookie is in memory with the browser process, it introduces some limitations:

• The cookie is retained only as long as the browser is open; when the browser is closed the cookie is destroyed with everything else in memory that the browser was using.
• The cookie belongs to the browser's application process (such as the .exe file for the browser), and cannot be shared with other processes. Office system applications run in their own processes, for example, msword.exe for Microsoft Office Word. As such, a cookie that a user generated when logging into the site in the browser cannot be shared with Word.

The issues described in this article clarify why the Enable Client Integration option was developed: to help make the end-user experience more uniform and predictable in that environment; however, the user experience is somewhat different for users that are accustomed to SharePoint sites secured with Windows authentication. Even with those restrictions, there are still a few options that can be used to allow for using forms authentication and yet still provide many or all of the deep integration points with Office applications that are available when using Windows authentication.

Reference of above content: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977430.aspx#MOSSFBAPart3_IntegratingWithOffice2007