Today, we came across an issue with Outlook Web Access 2007 (OWA). Whenever a user is using Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), OWA will kick them out after a short period time, and if they doubleclicked on an email, OWA will prompt them for the username and password credential again. This seems to be only happening with IE8 regardless using the light version of OWA or not. All other version of IE, e.g. IE6 and IE7, worked with no problems. Other browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome worked fine too. From searching and reading online, IE 8 was built with more secure security settings which in turn causes OWA to act differently. We have tried changing some of the IE security settings under the “Tools” menu. For example, we unchecked the “Enable Integrated Windows Authentication” as a site suggested, but this didn’t work. With more searching, we found a site that mention an option settings in OWA itself that when downloaded and installed it worked. User’s are not prompted for multiple credentials or kicked out from session timeout.
OWA Settings
- Logon with OWA, the user will need to click on the ‘OPTIONS’ menu on the top right hand side.
- On the left hand options menu, look for the ‘E-Mail Security’ link and click it.
- From the ‘E-Mail Security’ page, download and install the “Outlook Web Access S/MIME control”
- IE will prompt you for permission to install this add-on, allow this.
- Logoff and relaunch IE 8
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This didn’t work for me. Since our setup is different. We have a load balancer device infront of the cas servers. The fix for us is to change the persistent on our load balancer. This fixed the IE 8 issue for us. Hope this help.
Read about Session Management with IE8.
http://blogs.msdn.com/askie/archive/2009/05/08/session-management-within-internet-explorer-8-0.aspx
Thank venom9394 and dchen!
I found another link that looks like is the main cause of the problem.
http://blogs.msdn.com/brad_hughes/archive/2009/10/15/internet-explorer-8-impacts-owa-load-balancing-scenarios.aspx
Wow, finally I find something that explains what’s going on. I’ve been hammering my hosting company with complaints about this, but they don’t seem to have any clue. Many thanks.