How is the Windows phone doing this ?????

[johnw230873]

We have the odd thing happening with our Windows Phone 8 devices and although it’s cool we need to work out how it is doing it. The short description is that if a staff member sends a non-public hyperlink of an internal SharePoint Office Document in an email to another user using a Windows Phone 8 device they can open that link without being on our network. It seems to be some integration going on with the Mobile Office Hub as if they try to send a link that isn’t an Office doc then it won’t open (e.g. a pdf), also if they copy a paste the link into the phones Browser it doesn’t open, it only opens from Outlook.


Key points here are:

The hyperlink sent in the document is a internal link as in it can't be resolved from the outside world
The phone used for the test has never send the document before
​

We don't have any forward facing SharePoint sites so it can't be UAG
We don't have any SharePoint sites added to "Add SharePoint site" in the Office Hub
​

Because I had so many questions thinking it was some type of cache here is a test we did

Procedure for this test

Reset phone
Press get started
Select English
Accept the “Windows Phone Terms of Use”
Select recommended settings
Select Default time
Select “Sign in later for “Keep your life sync”
Wait for the “Setting up of your phone”
Click next on “Almost done”
Select accept on “Thank you for choosing Nokia”
Click on the “not now” for the Nokia Pro Camera app “A pop up for the Nokia 1020”
Goto setting
Goto email+accounts
Add an account
Click on Outlook
Enter email and password information
Click sign in
Phone is asking for password to be set
Set password
Phone is asking to download Lync from store
Deselect the “Download Lync from the Store” and press done
Wait for mail account to sync
On a computer go to the internal SharePoint site
pick random word doc and select send to email as link
sent email
on the phone open the outlook client
click on link
phone opened document
went back to email client and copied link
pasted in phone Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer couldn't resolve it.​

As this is a fresh phone, no wifi is turned on, no hub settings are set, no live account is set

I know it is the Hub as no other type of device can open these apart from Windows Phone 8 devices (haven't tried Windows Phone 7) and also if I untick the "Open SharePoint links in the Office hub" it doesn't work.

So if anyone knows how the phone is able to resolve to a document from the outside world when it can't resolve the name please let me know as I lost with this one.

 

[gsquared]

We are a bunch of phone enthusiasists, not network engineers. Sounds like you need some network security people as well.

 

[Ordeith]

Hmmm. Is it possible the phone is requesting the document through exchange somehow? Presumably exchange can see the SharePoint site. Maybe it proxies on behalf of the phone client?

 

[thelostsoul]

Add an account
Click on Outlook
Enter email and password information
Click sign in
Phone is asking for password to be set
Set password

It looks to me like you are syncing this device with some form of corporate account. Try this:

Go to outlook.com and create a random (live) account that is not linked to anything at all. Repeat your above steps: Reset the WP8 phone, but only link it to the new outlook account. Do not associate this account with anything else, just a raw, brand new @outlook.com (live) account, and make sure that is the only thing on the phone - when you setup the phone, it should not prompt you to set a password. When you share the file via link, ensure it is shared to this new @outlook.com address and no one else.

What this will tell you:
If it opens the file still - you have some form of SharePoint/firewall issue, or your phone is somehow getting on your network.
If it fails to open the file - your original process involved adding an email that downloading your corporate network settings, and when you clicked the link from the email, you were actually on the corporate network.

 

[johnw230873]

Ok, so I've done the Outlook.com test and it tries to open the doc but comes up with "You can't download the document because you don't have a connection to the server. Try again later."

To me it appears when I set up the On premise Outlook account, it is using this to connect to the SharePoint site i.e. using our exchange server as the proxy.