CredentialVault Service

Sharepoint service is a web application running on Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), and it suites the authentication model within IIS. There are different ways of authentication on IIS, but out-of-box, it supports Basic Authentication (if enabled in IIS), NTLM and Kerberos if enabled. While talking to Sharepoint service in WSS List portlet via its web service interface, it needs to be able to handle those authentication schema in a http connection as well.

The CredentialVault service is used to store user credentials (such as user name and password) for the Sharepoint sites where you have an account. You can use the CredentialVault service to define the scope (realm) that user credentials are accepted (such as a Sharepoint site URL). For example, when you specify user credentials for the site http://nicp123.wss.test.com, it defines the realm for all the services listed under the site, while all added WSS List portlets within the site use the stored credential for communicating with the web service.

If you add a Sharepoint Service (List) as a portlet when the credential is not set in the site url, or if the credentials are wrongly set, the portlet do not display any of the resources, and displays a message saying The credential is not accepted by the site. Please reset it in membership portlet. The following is an example of a Sharepoint Service added as a portlet, when CredentialVault is set improperly:

Figure 3–8 The message displayed on a WSS List portlet when the CredentialVault is not set