Anonymous user permission issue in SharePoint Server

Question

I am using SharePoint Server 2007 x64 and Windows Server 2008 x64. I have setup a site with template publishing portal. I have grant anonymous access to all the site.

My question is, if I create a new page, how do I grant permission to an anonymous user to access (read permission) the page? I got confused because for the permission setting of a page, a permission is set according to a user name (e.g. read permission for user "foo" of a page). Since anonymous user does not have a related "user name", how could I grant read permission to anonymous user?

BTW: I use Windows Forms authentication and Windows NTLM authentication for my sites.

Answer 1

You shouldn't have to do anything except grant anonymous users access to the site. SharePoint should take care of the rest automatically.

If this isn't working for you, you may have a configuration issue. This blog post by Andrew Connell may help.

http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/HowToConfigPublishingSiteWithDualAuthProvidersAndAnonAccess.aspx

Answer 2

Also, note that IF you have any custom code (a webcontrol for example) that tries to perform some action that cannot be performed by anonymous users, you will be redirected to the login page (unless the code is wrapped in RunWithElevatedPrivileges).

Although I get the impression that you do not have any custom code, it's worth mentioning it. I have seen it a few times where developers develop custom webcontrols for a publishing site without turning anonymous mode on on their dev boxes. Later when anonymous access needs to be turned on and pages aren't being served as expected, they think it's a configuration issue, when in fact it's a code issue.

Answer 3

Well there are kind of two steps 1, Set Anonymous Access for the web application 2, Allow anonymous access within SharePoint itself.

Good post about it here:

http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2006/09/25/Enabling-anonymous-access-in-SharePoint-2007.aspx