SharePoint 2010 Blog – Anonymous Access

Okay, so maybe charging ahead on Beta 1 isn`t always the best idea.  I got my blog site up at blog.petercarson.ca with very little difficulty.  I pasted up a few of my posts, and things were still looking good.  We registered the DNS name, setup the rules on our ISA Server to publish it out, and voila, my blog site was live on the web.

That’s where things went off the rails.  Our www2010.envisionit.com site is coming along nicely too, and that was published in the same way.  In both cases I wanted the sites to be available anonymously.  No sense in doing all this writing if no one can see it.  Well the www site was publishing fine, but the blog site wouldn’t stop requesting authentication.  It wasn’t the ISA Server, as the same thing was happening inside the network. 

Setting up anonymous access in SP2010 is really the same as in MOSS 2007.  You start off in Central Admin and find your way to the Authentication Providers section (it’s under Application Settings in SP2010).  Open the authentication provider for the site you want to setup, and make sure the enable anonymous access checkbox is checked.  Once you’ve done that go into the site or area of the site that you want to enable anonymous access for, go into Permissions for that area, and make sure that Anonymous access is setup.  Rumour has it if you are running multiple authentication providers for a site, this also gets easier so you don’t need to setup anonymous access on the provider you are using for management.

I double and triple checked the settings on the blog site, and couldn’t get this to work.  I had a look at Microsoft Connect (where the beta support is provided) and saw a number of posts on the same topic, and the answers were basically Microsoft wasn’t able to reproduce on the latest build, and to wait for Beta 2.  Oh well.

So I went back to MOSS 2007, installed the Codeplex Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition, and started again setting up the blog.  And that’s where this is now (unless I’ve upgraded this since writing it, which is possible).