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I wish the SAS Addin for Microsoft had amnesia

I have talked to a number of customers that are having a problem with the SAS Addin for Microsoft Office (AMO) remembering a users password and then locking them out of their account.

When a user configures their connection to the SAS Server in AMO they can save their password, so they effectively gain a form of single sign on. (The password is stored as an encrypted text string in an XML file).

A number of customers I talked to also have some form of LDAP authentication setup (i.e. Active Directory), Unfortunately when a user changes their password on the LDAP server, AMO doesn’t know about it. It keeps trying to authenticate the user with their old password until the users account gets locked.

SAS Enterprise Guide also enables the user to store their connection credentials, but it seems to prompt the user to re-enter their credentials if the authentication with the server fails, therefore the users account doesn’t get locked.

We are working through some work arounds for this to see if we can fix the AMO issue, but has anybody else struck this?

Anybody else fixed it?

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 8:20 am and is filed under Addin for Office. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “I wish the SAS Addin for Microsoft had amnesia”

  1. Alan Churchill Says:
    July 3rd, 2008 at 2:27 pm

    Sorry, I was just turned onto this blog.

    Have you considered writing an EG add-in and use it to authenticate instead of the built-in EG functionality? Authenticating to LDAp is pretty straightforward in .NET so you could detect an authenticate failure and kick it back.

    I would also just send Stephen McDaniel an email or post it on SAS-L.

    Alan

  2. Shane Gibson Says:
    July 3rd, 2008 at 9:19 pm

    Thanks Alan.

    Good point, Ill contact Stephen and see if he knows of a work around for the Office add-in, I hadn’t thought of contacting him.

    Most of the lock out issues seem to happen in AMO rather than EG, but thats a great idea for an EG plugin, ill add it to our development list.

    Cheers
    Shane

  3. Chris Hamilton Says:
    August 28th, 2008 at 12:04 pm

    Shane, did you ever make any headway on this problem? I’d like to know of a fix as well.

  4. Shane Gibson Says:
    August 29th, 2008 at 10:30 pm

    Hi Chris

    I have a cunning plan to manage this by deleting the password files each time a user los in, but we haven’t got around to testing it yet.

    Ill let you know when we do and whether it works or not.

    Cheers
    Shane

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