Authentication in SharePoint

One of the great things about an intranet site is allowing everyone in the company to access the data they need in one place. It is even better yet if they can remember one password to get to that information. If you are using NTLM authentication you can get this type of integration because users log into SharePoint with the same Active Directory accounts that they are logging into their systems and very likely, their email as well. This works even better if you set up a Global Policy to add the SharePoint site to the trusted Intranet locations in IE. The credientials of the users machine logon will automatically be passed onto SharePoint. (If you don't create a global policy, each user will need to add the SharePoint site to their Intranet sites individually and if you are trying to get people on board with SharePoint, you won't want them to have to do that.)

One of the interesting things that I have yet to find a solution for, is that when a user needs to log in (in the case that you want added security, see future blog post for more details on this), the domain does not automatically populate. If you try to just type in the login name and password, SharePoint will keep prompting and then after the 3rd time you will get Access Deined. This can become a sticking point for SharePoint because most users may not even know the domain that they are logging into. It would be nice if there was some way to prepopulate the domain part of the login and allow the users to only enter their username and password and the domain would be appended to the login automatically. I have yet to find a way to do this and am in the process of doing some more research on the topic. If anyone has any ideas on the topic, let me know.