OneNote + WebDAV Update

[David Tse [MS]]

Given the interest in the area, I wanted to set the story straight (so far)
for hosting OneNote notebooks on plain WebDAV servers.

This does NOT apply to SharePoint.

For clients running Windows XP
=====================
Unfortunately in XP, OneNote notebooks on plain WebDAV servers won't be
supported. The reason being XP issues unauthenticated OPTIONS, PROPFIND, and
MOVE WebDAV requests even when the client is authenticated. Because these
requests fail on secured DAV servers, OneNote fails to sync.

If you insist, there is an UNSUPPORTED work around to enable this scenario.
To do this, enable unauthenticated OPTIONS and PROPFIND requests on your DAV
server. Please do not, I repeat, DO NOT, allow unauthenticated MOVE requests
for security reasons. This allows XP OneNote clients to host notebooks on a
plain DAV server, but won't be able to rename or move sections.

To do this on Apache, edit httpd.conf to allow unauthenticated access for
PROPFIND and OPTIONS requests to the notebook.
For example, it may look like this:

<LimitExcept OPTIONS PROPFIND>
AuthType Digest
AuthName DAV
AuthUserFile conf/digest.passwd
require valid-user
</LimitExcept>


For Clients Running Vista
================
In Vista, accessing WebDAV with basic authentication over non-SSL servers is
flat out not allowed. That’s because we don't ever want to send your
login/password in plain text through the wire.

For all other WebDAV servers, OneNote notebooks on WebDAV servers should be
supported in Vista. However, we've hit some issues that prevent this from
working and we're working with the Windows WebDAV team to fix that up. Stay
tuned for an update on this soon...

Hope this helps,

David Tse[MS]

 

[Jake.O.Crane]

Hi David,

Thanks a lot for summarizing the WebDAV issues and providing the
Apache work around for WinXP + OneNote 2007.

I have a few follow up questions that I hope you might have the
answers to.

(1) What exactly do you mean by a plain WebDav server? Is there any
possible WebDav server configuration that will work with Windows XP
clients besides using Sharpoint?

(2) What are the chances this will be fixed in Windows XP or through a
SP update to One Note 2007?

(3) Do you know if there are similar problems with Office 2007 and
WebDAV servers?

Thanks in advance,
Jake

 

[jeffrey_t_b]

Thanks, David, for posting this update. I'm more than willing to help out
test stuff, if you like. I've tried using Apache as the WebDav server, over
HTTPS, and had posted bugs about it during the Beta. Ah well... Hopefully
the fix will come in SP1 or something.

My experiences with it:
http://www.borlik.net/blog/archives/000157.html

I can get it working with HTTPS, as long as the PROPFINDs and OPTIONs are
allowed to be unsecured (unauthenticated and unencrypted). Arghh. Does
anyone know if that is enough to be able to use it with Vista?
(Unfortunately, I haven't been able to test it with Vista yet.)

I'm not an expert with IIS (and not even really that good with Apache), but
I kind of think that IIS wouldn't give one the flexibility to turn on/off
permissions to the same detailed level as Apache. (The previous sentence is
flamebait, I imagine. I'd like to know how to do it, anyway.)

I should note that I haven't had trouble with the other Office 2007 apps
over WebDav. But then again, those other apps are much simpler: They only
deal with individual files, rather than OneNote's use of directories to
manage notebooks.