Recently Microsoft released Windows Live Writer, a blog authoring tool from its BETA hell to, well, Live.  The tool has a lot of promise and is a vast improvement over the default editor in Community Server.

If you are a corporate user of this software that uses Community Servers integrated login module, you were out of luck, sort of until I discovered a forum post by Telligent employee Kevin Harder.

Windows Live Writer and Integrated authentication – Community Server

Windows Live Writer does not natively support integrated logins at this point and requires a username and password to setup a Community Server Weblog account.  To do this you need to perform one of the following workarounds.

Method A – Manipulating Community Server DB

1. Open IIS manager and drill down to your Community Server installation.  Find the /blogs/metablog.ashx file, right-click on it and select Properties.  Then click the File Security tab, click the Edit authentication button, and check the enable anonymous access checkbox.  This tells your web server to allow anonymous access to just the MetaBlog API service.
2. Now connect to your Community Server database, and find your username in the aspnet_Users table.  Note the UserId value for it.
3. Find the row in the aspnet_Membership table for your UserId.  Update the Password column value to be something that you will remember.  In addition, update the PasswordFormat column to be 0.  If you do not set the PasswordFormat column you will receive an error from Live Writer.  “An error occurred while attempting to connect to your weblog: Blog Server Error – Server Error 0 Occurred” User does not exist, you must correct this error before proceeding.“
4. You should now be able to connect with Windows Live Writer using your username and the password that you chose.

Method B – Using the CS Administration Panel

1. Open IIS manager and drill down to your Community Server installation.  Find the /blogs/metablog.ashx file, right-click on it and select Properties.  Then click the File Security tab, click the Edit authentication button, and check the enable anonymous access checkbox.  This tells your web server to allow anonymous access to just the MetaBlog API service.
2. In your CS administration panel, click the membership panel tab and then Create New Account.  Create an account that you want to connect using Live Writer and assign it appropriate permissions within CS.  No database changes required.
3. You should now be able to connect with Windows Live Writer using your username and the password that you chose.

In either case you need to allow the metablog api control permissions to be accessed by anonymous users.  Method B works around using the existing user and creates an account just for use with Live Writer.

This implementation was tested with Community Server 2007.1 (SQL2005 data store) and Windows Live Writer 2008 (build 12.0.1366.1026).