SharePoint Connector on IIS 7

Came across an issue yesterday where a customer wanted to install EPiServer CMS on an IIS 7 together with EPiServer Connect for SharePoint for integration with SharePoint. As you probably already know, EPiServer CMS supports IIS 7 since the R2 release. However configuring the SharePoint connector is done somewhat different than for previous IIS versions.

If you are going to configure the SharePoint connector I suggest you to start of by reading this tech note, since this blog post will not cover all the details included. But when comes to configuring the IIS 7 for Basic Authentication you should look here instead, since it is here things are a bit different. In IIS 7 you can only turn on Basic Authentication on for the entire site (or turn it off), and you cannot run it in combination with for instance Forms Authentication for obvious reasons. So just make sure that Basic Authentication is enabled in the Windows features, in Windows 7 it will look like this:

 
Also make sure that Basic Authentication is disabled for your site in IIS 7.

 
Now you might think, what the h***? If I turn off Basic Authentication how could SharePoint connector use it?! Well actually the tag you inserted in the web.config (see below) is an EPiServer hack to enable Basic Authentication on the requests made to a particular location.

<EPiServer.basicAuthentication sendBasicChallenge="true" basicRealm="" />

Hopefully now you will shout out something like; Hallelujah it works!