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

I can't believe they call this a feature. However, here's a featurefix for Apache:

RewriteEngine On

# Send a 200 to MS Office so it just hands over control to the browser
# It does not use existing session cookies and would be redirected to the login page otherwise
# https://www.wimpyprogrammer.com/microsoft-office-link-pre-fetching-and-single-sign-on/

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ;\sms-office(\)|;)
RewriteRule .* - [R=200,L]

Might not be best performance wise, as the whole page gets sent instead of an empty response, but I did not want to add another Apache modules just for fixing such an idio^H^H^H^H feature.