Why are cookies unrecognized when a link is clicked from an external source (i.e. Excel, Word, etc…)

Question

I noticed that when a link is clicked externally from the web browser, such as from Excel or Word, that my session cookie is initially unrecognized, even if the link opens u

Answer 1

We had this same problem and wrote an open source gem to help those using rails: https://github.com/spilliton/fix_microsoft_links

You can use the same approach we used on any framework though:

1. Detect if the user agent is from a Microsoft product
2. Render a blank html page with a meta refresh tag that will cause the browser to refresh the page with the correct cookies

Example code here: https://github.com/spilliton/fix_microsoft_links/blob/master/lib/fix_microsoft_links.rb