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 are seeing a problem that TWO Chrome tabs are opened when clicking an URL from MS Word, and the page to open has JavaScript redirection: window.location.href=blabla

By debugging from the servers side, we confirmed that there are requests sent from Office app, besides Chrome. This is so wierd.

But anyway, by checking the request header "User-Agent", and returning an empty page to Office apps, our TWO tabs issue got resolved. That's definitely the right thing to do!