Office 2013 Preview & Windows 8: OneNote on Office 365 (SharePoint) won’t open in OneNote client and won’t sync

So the last few days, in some stolen moments between projects I’ve been setting up a collaboration portal for our customers and us to share information, e.g. meeting notes, invoices and various other sundry documents and the obvious choice was Office 365/SharePoint online. As a reseller for Office 365 we get entitlement to a large number of licences and it seems logical to make the most of that and to bring us closer to our customers while improving service, transparency and reducing email clutter.

Previously we’d looked at moving exclusively to SharePoint online but due to our Reporting Services integration we couldn’t but I had already seen OneNotes happily syncing there to local clients from previous tests so I knew it worked.

Office 2013 Preview OneNote however, it hasn’t worked for me without making some tweaks to the registry. Your mileage may vary.

Tested combinations

Windows 8, Office 2013 (clean install), IE 10: Failed

Windows 8, Office 2013 (upgrade), IE 10: Failed

Windows 8, Office 2010, IE 10: Worked

Windows 7, Office 2013, IE 9: Worked

The obvious common part is Office 2013 Preview on Windows 8 Sad smile

The Error Message

We need a password to sync this notebook. (Error code: 0xE0000024).

Other reports

Several other people have reported that they had this error and several fixes under different contexts. Sadly though, none paned out and most referred to SkyDrive so were a no go anyway.

However, there was mention of registry keys and Forms Based Authentication so it got me thinking.

https://plus.google.com/116023016216120558685/posts/5YAK73L3idv

http://mundoepm.com.br/2012/08/02/onenote-we-need-the-password-to-sync-this-notebook-error-code-0xe0000024/

http://errorspotting.com/?p=51

http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-onenote/archive/2011/11/08/free-update-for-onenote-2010-improves-skydrive-and-sync-features.aspx

Deeper Dive into the traffic

On the failing Windows 8 machine I got fiddler going and had a look at what was going on when OneNote was trying to sync. In the header I saw the 403 response “Access Denied”. Well, at least this is something… Of course I tried logging into the site as well as microsoftonline.com for good measure too, no luck.

HTTP/1.1 403 FORBIDDEN
Content-Length: 13
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-SharePointHealthScore: 0
SPRequestGuid: 125fe39b-3155-0007-4d62-8cb2bb1fee0f
request-id: 125fe39b-3155-0007-4d62-8cb2bb1fee0f
X-Forms_Based_Auth_Required: https://thefullcircle.sharepoint.com/_forms/default.aspx?ReturnUrl=/_layouts/error.aspx
X-Forms_Based_Auth_Return_Url: https://thefullcircle.sharepoint.com/_layouts/error.aspx
X-MSDAVEXT_Error: 917656; Access denied. Before opening files in this location, you must first browse to the web site and select the option to login automatically.
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices: 15.0.0.4433
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-MS-InvokeApp: 1; RequireReadOnly
P3P: CP="ALL IND DSP COR ADM CONo CUR CUSo IVAo IVDo PSA PSD TAI TELo OUR SAMo CNT COM INT NAV ONL PHY PRE PUR UNI"
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2012 16:19:25 GMT

All of this led me onto looking into the Sign in Assistant which was already installed but I went ahead and ran a repair. Still no change after a reboot.

The Fix

In a wiki page that talks about manually installing the Office 365 components there is a mention of a registry key for Office 2010 and Office 365 to play nice –

Microsoft Office 2010 Update

(KB2435954)

Microsoft Office 2010 on Windows XP with Internet Explorer 7

Allows users to access Microsoft SharePoint Online from Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft Excel 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, and Microsoft OneNote 2010.

Important In addition to applying this update, you must add the following registry key for each user: [HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Internet\FormsBasedAuthSettings\AllowFBANoPatches – DWORD: 1]

Also, If you have Office 2010 SP1 Beta installed, you will first need to uninstall the SP1 Beta before installing this update.

http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/administration/manually-install-office-365-desktop-updates.aspx

Well, well, well. What have you here? A registry key for allowing forms authentication stuff for Office 365. This looked too good to pass by without having a go.

Clearly the “14.0” needed to change to “15.0” for Office 2013 Preview and I tested it with HKLM rather than HKCU.

I created the key and…pay dirt. Closed OneNote and reopened it and it synced straight away.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Internet\FormsBasedAuthSettings]
"AllowFBANoPatches"=dword:00000001

Update 22/11/2012

After another reboot the next day it looks another issue has popped in with syncing. Will update this post when I’ve investigated and resolved it.

We’re sorry, something went wrong during sync. We’ll try again later. (Error code: 0x5B4)

Error 1460 – Error Code 0x5B4

Windows Error Code 1460: ‘ERROR_TIMEOUT’

Description of Error:This operation returned because the timeout period expired.