One of the biggest user peeves with SharePoint is the authentication prompts.  I get questions about this all the time, so I thought I would explain some simple configuration changes either you or your system administrator can implement to make your SharePoint experience just a bit better.

There are 2 scenarios that I will cover:

1. Visiting the site from your work network; this assumes your workstation is bound to the same domain as the SharePoint implementation.
2. Visiting a SharePoint site of another company, such as an extranet for a partner company.  This would assume your workstation is bound to a different domain than the SharePoint implementation –or- Visiting the site from a workstation that is not bound to any domain (home computer or workgroup).

There are of course scenarios where you will get prompted regardless, in case 2 above, if you open a Microsoft Office document (Excel, Word, etc), after the corresponding Office application opens, you will be presented with a dialogue box requesting your credentials.  This is by design, meaning when the Office application opens, it is initiating a new session to the server, this new session does not have access to the credentials you offered up when initially logging into the site.

If you fall into the category of case 1, and you are being prompted for credentials when opening Office documents from SharePoint libraries, follow the procedure described for that scenario.

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After installing WSS3 SP2 on a clean install of Server 2008 x86 SP2 STD, and using SQL 2008 SP1 as the backend, I could not get any search results.  The setup is about as simple of a farm installation you can get, it is for a small number of users, and demonstration purposes, so everything is installed on a single machine virtualized on an HP server running VMware ESXi 3.5.  There are two site collections using different application pools, one enabled for anonymous access, and the other not.

The search service is common to both, but the crawl account (data access) is unique.

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!IMPORTANT!

All installations of Microsoft Office Server 2007 that have installed SP2 for SharePoint Services are affected by the following bulletin.  In short, it has reset your license key putting the product in trial mode, and it will expire in 180 days without notice.  See the below article for the resolution, and more details.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx