MS Office Hyperlinks And Secure Sites

After spending a great deal of time helping lock down file access for restricted areas of the Cobb County site, we began experiencing issues with pages that required login before accessing, even though the user was already shown as logged in. Troubleshooting narrowed down the problem to users of MS Office. It seems that MS Office doesn't carry cookies with it's links, according to this article by Lars Pind.

The workaround described by Lars Pind worked out rather well for us. I established a new webroot file to catch failed authentication attempts for the file system and redirect them back to the file system a second time to attempt getting the file, since the browser will carry the cookie that MS Office fails to pick up.

Due to the sensitive nature of the code in question, I cannot post snippets, but you should easily be able to discern your own workaround based on the above-linked article.