Sharepoint 2016 on-premise with ADFS - cannot open an office document in desktop app, credentials not working

Question

I have a setup made-up of 2 machines:

• one Windows Server 2012 with Sharepoint 2016 (and other additional features like DNS, ADFS, ADDS, ADCS, etc.)
• one "client machine" used to access the Sharepoint, also with Office 2016 installed.

The Sharepoint is configured to use an ADFS Trusted Identity provider, and Windows Authentication is disabled. Logging-in to Sharepoint with users from that domain works fine. (eg. [email protected])

THE PROBLEM: I click an Office document in Sharepoint (eg. sample.docx), I use the "Open in Word" feature, the Word app opens and prompts for SharePoint credentials in order to open the file. The same credentials that I use to browse the SharePoint form a browser, do not work in Word. (same problemf or excel, powerpoint, etc...) I tried various syntax forms ([email protected], DOMAIN.NAME\username), but it made no difference.

Any ideas to fix this ?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I found the fix to this issue by accident after a while: try to open documents (in Word, Excel, Powerpoint...) from Internet explorer first.

In this case, authentication works fine. Furthermore, after this step, documents can be properly opened in correct apps from other browsers as well (tested Chrome and Firefox).

Most likely there is a Sharepoint-related bug in the way the initial authentication token is passed to the desktop app, making this process to only work correct in Internet Explorer.