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TonyWilson's avatar
TonyWilson
Brass Contributor
Dec 30, 2021

View in File Explorer - Cookies are only Persistent for a week

  About a week later, the folders in file explorer will come up with access denied. Seems like the cookies are gone. Just clicking "View in File Explorer" at any document library will re...
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ChristianJBergstrom's avatar
ChristianJBergstrom
MVP
Jan 03, 2022

TonyWilson No worries, it's an interesting question so had to jump on it. Out of curiosity, have your org. configured persistent browser session and/or sign-in frequency using CA? Let me know the outcome of your testing if you have the time for it, thanks.

TonyWilson's avatar
TonyWilson
Brass Contributor
Jan 03, 2022

ChristianJBergstrom 

We only have one policy, just forcing MFA to all users, excluding our internal IPs
No other condition is selected in that policy

Besides that, we followed the documentation and added with powershell "Set-SPOTenant -UsePersistentCookiesForExplorerView $true" and then configured couple of local machines via the registry to have the view in file explorer dropdown in edge (verified that it was accepted in edge/policy)

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge\ConfigureViewInFileExplorer]
"1"="{ \"cookies\": [ \"rtFa\", \"FedAuth\" ], \"domain\": \"(TENANT).sharepoint.com\" }"
"2"="{ \"cookies\": [ \"rtFa\", \"FedAuth\" ], \"domain\": \"(TENANT)-my.sharepoint.com\" }"

    • TonyWilson's avatar
      TonyWilson
      Brass Contributor
      Jan 04, 2022

      Win AD 2016 and Azure (P1) AD Connect with User Sign-in Seamless sso enabled

      So AD FS 2016 with PSSO enabled and testing on a registered device.

       

      ...which probably had more than 14 days not accessing SharePoint from file explorer, that could have killed the cookie.

       

      Very interesting link and something to study tomorrow with the team 🙂 I will test the 14 days now window (accessing with File Explorer those document libraries daily but leaving the OneDrive one alone for two weeks)

       

      I now have better understanding of the view in File explorer vs OneDrive sync, where the latter is an app doing constant syncing and authentication (when it is working, lol), while the view in File explorer relies on cookies and FS to keep the link live, which at some point, sooner or later, it will have to be manually re-activated.

      It was designed as an alternative view while you are in SharePoint anyway, not a permanent tool for file explorer 🙂

       

      Thanks for pointing me to the right direction ChristianJBergstrom  🙂

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