itaysk

Short story: SharePoint 2010 RTM (as opposed to beta 2) doesn’t support Forms Based Authentication with Classic Mode, only with Claims Based Authentication.

Long story: SharePoint 2010 introduces a new authentication type – Claims Based Authentication. The old type that we know from 2007 is still available and is now referred to as Classic Mode Authentication.

SharePoint 2007 provided an option to work with Forms Based Authentication. SharePoint 2010 beta 2 carried on with this to support FBA both on Classic and Claims mode.

I have tried to configure FBA on my SharePoint 2010 RTM server, and faced this screen:

As you can see, all options but Windows Authentication are grayed out. There is no explanation, and clicking the links for more details doesn’t give much details, or tell you way it’s grayed out.

At first I was shocked. Then I stated to think what I did wrong… It took a while before I realized that this behavior is by design.

Just for comparison, Here is the same screen on my Beta 2 machine:

After seeing this with my own eyes, I have searched and found verification on TechNet:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262350(office.14).aspx#section2

This option was dropped in the RTM, meaning that SharePoint 2010 RTM doesn’t support Forms Based Authentication with Classic Mode, only with Claims Based Authentication.

This means that every application that used FBA, must migrate to claims based authentication with SharePoint 2010.

Here are tow good tutorial I found for doing that:

http://donalconlon.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/configuring-forms-base-authentication-for-sharepoint-2010-using-iis7/

http://blogs.technet.com/mahesm/archive/2010/04/07/configure-forms-based-authentication-fba-with-sharepoint-2010.aspx