Chrome and Integrated Authentication

In a my post earlier today I noted that Google Chrome wasn’t passing credentials through to our SharePoint intranet.  Having played with Chrome a bit more this afternoon unfortunately it seems it’s not just SharePoint that suffers.  

With Chrome seemingly not supporting Windows Integrated Authentication, if you’re using an Internet proxy server with authentication enabled you’ll be prompted for credentials each time you want to browse an external web site.  Not a great user experience…

The good news is that the problem is logged with Google here so will hopefully be fixed in the future.

What’s that you say? Google released a browser?

I didn’t really think I’d be posting anything about Chrome… there’s just so much out there already.  Having downloaded and installed it though there are some interesting things in there that I thought I’d comment on.

  1. Proxy Settings – it would seem that Chrome uses/obeys the Windows Internet Properties, so if you’re configuring proxy settings etc via GPO Chrome will obey these settings.  From an enterprise perspective this is good – it was the first thing people asked here for example.  It’s nice to see Google following this route, though end users wanting to bypass said proxy servers might not like it..!It’s worth noting that I imported settings etc from IE during the installation, so Chrome might have picked up this behaviour from there.  I’ll have to test it later.
  2. Integrated Authentication – Having just visited our SharePoint based intranet I noticed that Chrome isn’t passing through my Windows credentials to the site resulting in a logon prompt that I don’t get with IE.  Once you’ve logged in though, the credentials are cached for the remainder of the session.
  3. Sharepoint – From an initial look, Chrome doesn’t seem to offer a great experience in SharePoint, I’m not sure it’s even providing the ‘Level 2 Browser‘ experience you get with Firefox et al.
  4. Default Search Engine – This is something I’ve never configured on my computer, though I do always use Google.  It was nice to see that Chrome picked up what must have been the standing default and is defaulting to Live Search.  Not that I use that, but I like that they haven’t just defaulted Google.

Working with Generation Y

Generation Y.  It’s a term that keeps coming up.  Before that it was Digital Natives, and I’m sure different companies and areas have their own terms.  What makes these guys so special eh?

Well I guess the most basic answer is that these are the guys that our companies will be employing from this point on.  If you work in an internal IS group like me, that makes them our customers.

For anyone born after 1984 or so, social web applications like Facebook and messaging tools like MSN or Sykpe are part and parcel of life.  Of course there are plenty of other examples, and I’m sure that these things are just as important for some of us slightly older types.  But it’s Generation Y that really sum up this new wave of technology savvy people who use and rely on technology far more than ever before.  It’s this consumerisation of the workforce and the tools they demand that cause problems in enterprise IT.

For the past 10-15 years the primary drivers for many enterprise IT groups has been simple:  Reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and then hopefully earn the opportunity to use some of those savings to deliver extra value to the business. 

This lead to the usual standardising of services to reduce complexity and and consolidation of those services to further reduce management and support costs. 

In effect this means standardising and locking down what people can do to server the greater good.  It’s never really been a popular move with end users, but from a business standpoint it has made a lot sense. 

The times are a changin’ however.  The need to attract and retain Generation Y is starting to have a profound effect on these old strategies.  With technology now playing such an important part of peoples lives its becoming a factor in peoples decisions about where they work.  The traditional locked down computers, controlled applications and restricted Internet access just isn’t going to cut it with people used to communicating and collaborating live online.

What does this mean for IT?  Well for a start we’ll need to be a lot more open in our approaches.  The problem is that often the old drivers for low TCO etc still stand.  So in the short term at least there are some compromises to be made.