NTLM Proxy Authentication with Google Cloud Connect

Google Cloud Connect would be useful software at work if it supported our proxy server properly. Unfortunately, it doesnʼt support integrated Windows authentication, and to provide a username and password, you have to specify a proxy server explicitly and it doesnʼt work from home. Hereʼs how to make Cloud Connect automatically detect the proxy server settings while signing in automatically too.

The secret to fixing it is to that Cloud Connect runs on Microsoft .NET and uses the System.Net HTTP classes to communicate with the Google servers. To configure the proxy, youʼll create an application configuration for Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Word, and set the useDefaultCredentials attribute on the <defaultProxy> element. You could also edit the machine.config file, but this file affects the entire system and can break rather a lot of unrelated applications, so I prefer not to.

First, create a new file called WINWORD.EXE.config using Notepad or your favorite alternative, and copy and paste the following text into it:

<configuration>
 <system.net>
  <defaultProxy useDefaultCredentials="true">
   <proxy usesystemdefault="true"/>
  </defaultProxy>
 </system.net>
</configuration>

Make sure the file is not accidentally called WINWORD.EXE.config.txt by showing file extensions in Windows Explorer.

To use this configuration, copy it into the same directory as WINWORD.EXE. For 32-bit Office 2010 with the default installation path on a 64-bit system, this will be C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\. Then rename the original file to EXCEL.EXE.config and copy it to the same directory, and finally do the same using POWERPNT.EXE.config as the file name.

You should now be able to restart Microsoft Office, and edit files on Google Docs without putting your username and password into the Cloud Connect proxy configuration.