Excel Add-In: Windows Authentication SSO Auto-Login

When a user opens an Excel Workbook that includes FastClose content, the FastClose add-in automatically detects that content.

For sites that use FastClose Authentication it will automatically popup a "Login" dialog, and for sites that use Windows Authentication Single Sign On, it will automatically log the user into FastClose.

This is generally fine and desired, but if there are a lot of FastClose reports in the workbook, it can take a while to complete this process before handing control of Excel back to the user, particularly if some of the ERP data sources are in other parts of the world to the user.

Now, for FastClose Authentication sites, this isn't a big problem (the user can just click "cancel" in the login dialog), but for Windows Authentication sites it can be annoying if all the user wanted to do, was to check some numbers that were already in the workbook and not to use FastClose. In that case, all the time logging into FastClose and reading the reports was a waste

To get around this problem, in 2.5.0 we added an option in the FastClose Excel Add-In ribbon tab labelled 'Auto Login'. This setting ONLY appears for sites that use Windows Authentication SSO.

The setting is enabled by default and is saved with the workbook. It can be found here:

If the user unticks this check box and saves the workbook, they will find that the next time they open it, the FastClose Excel Add-In will not automatically perform the login and report initialization process. As a result they can now browse the workbook without any of that delay.

But if they do want to refresh the reports, or add one, or otherwise interact with FastClose, they click the Login button in the FastClose ribbon tab to connect.