Enable Anonymous Access for SharePoint 2010/2013/2016
Here are 8 simple steps on how to set up anonymous access for SharePoint 2010/2013/2016 publishing sites. Even though, the screenshots below are taken from SharePoint 2010 server, the administration GUI is the same for SharePoint 2010, 2013 and 2016.
1. Starting in Central Administration, under Application Management, click on the Manage web applications.
2. Make sure you select the site you want to enable anonymous access and click on the Authentication Providers icon.
3. On the Authentication Providers pop-up window click on the Default zone.
4. Under Edit Authentication, check Enable anonymous access and click Save.
5. Going back to Web Application Management click on the Anonymous Policy icon.
6. Under Anonymous Access Restrictions select your Zone and set the Permissions to None – No policy and click Save.
7. Now, web application will allow anonymous access to be set. So, navigate to your top level site collection for the web application. Click the Site Actions > Site Settings. Under Users and Permissions click Site permissions.
8. Under Permission Tools, click Anonymous Access icon and set the permissions to Entire Web site and click OK.
That’s all, folks! If you followed these steps properly you should have now Anonymous Access enabled.
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Hello,
I am wondering how anonymous users can view Excel web part.
Thanks
Hi
I have a (publishing portal) site with anonymous acces enabled (thanks for your procedure) ,When i go to this site in anonymous i don’t get the same design that i got when i’m logged.
is there another master page for anonymous user ?
thanks for your help
When I get to step 8, there is no icon for anonymous access next to check permissions. However, I am certain that I have properly followed all of the preceding steps. Can you think of an explanation for this? Thanks so much.
For chris, don’t forget to check-in your Master page in order for the changes to take effect. For “Anonymous”, make sure you selected the right site and do an iisreset.
hi there,
I have tried Sharepoint 2010 with asphostcentral.com and so far, everything looks good. To be honest, the interface is completely different and I am amazed with the improvement that has been done on this Sharepoint version.
Anonymous Access is one of the issue that requires special attention. It is not easy to have it setup as you always need to check the application pool identity settings as well. Make sure it operates under NETWORK SERVICE
Hope this helps
The “Anonymous Access” button in Step #8 doesn’t appear for our extended web application with anonymous configured in Central Admin. Not sure why.
Very helpful thanks!
In our company we have internal Portal (by using SP server 2010) for internal user now we have a requirement to create a Team Site for our external users who will have upload different documents and perform other task. For this we have two type of user:
1. User with Active Directly ID
2. External user with email
Can any one guide us on how to plan to create and deploy SharePoint website where we have Single Form with separate DB server and around 100 users.
Same here. The “Anonymous Access” button in Step #8 doesn’t appear for our extended web application with anonymous configured in Central Admin.
Is it because we are using the default SQL Server Express?
In our company we have a public website with anonymous access. We need to add 3 forms (contact us, …). We found a SharePoint tool called “Kaldeera Advanced Forms”. info about this tool?
thanks in advance.
When I get to step 8, there is no icon for anonymous access next to check permissions. However, I am sure that i have followed all the steps .can you explain me why this happening
I’m also having the problem at step #8 where I don’t get the anonymous access button to appear. I’ve done an IISRESET and I have verified that I am accessing the same site that I was using in the earlier steps. Can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong?
For those who are experiencing trouble on step 8, make sure you are accessing the site from the correct url where the anonymous policy is defined.
Hi Julian
Thank you for giving very good explinatory post.
I am having issue with MySite Anonymous access.
Could you please clear my problem. In my sharepoint environment, i have mysite enabled. I gave my sharepoint site (main site) anonymous access. and users are able to login successfully without login prompt. However, when user clicks on MySite link on the page, he is getting login prompt. Dont know the reason.
I went to central admin and opend webapp that is created for mysite and givin anonymous access. but still didnt work.
please help me out.
thanks beforehand
raj
anonymous access working or not when we install different language packs( means multi lingual web site )
Awesome article.. Very helpful.
Thanks for sharing.
We had this silmilar problem with MySites not able to use Anonymous access. We called Microsoft support and they couldn’t figured it out. We setup everything correctly in SharePoint Administration and IIS. We turned on Anonymous access for mysite but didn’t work. We figured it out the problem. The root of the site http://mysites.woodbury.edu/personal/lauh doesn’t work with Anonymous access. you will have to create a new sub-site and turn on Anonymous access. For example we created a site called Portfolio and turned on Anonymous access. The site url is http://mysites.woodbury.edu/personal/lauh/portfolio and it worked.
I followed all the steps mentioned but it did not work. I had the option before but it disappeared. We have other forms that were configured to have anonymous access and they are still working fine but since yesterday the option disappeared . Is there a reset we need to do?
For those who have the problem seeing the anonymous button on the permissions of the site make sure you have selected the web application in central administration and followed the steps described to add the anonymous access.
I usually restart the server(s) (just to be sure)
hi in my application authentication provider is disable how can i enable
Thanks
Hi,
I have done the anonymous and checked it,works fine. But when I created the variation for english & french anonymous is not working. Asking the user name and password.. Even I give the anonymous to site collection asses and images. What did I miss? Pl guide me. very urgent.
Thanks.
Hi,
I face this issue, you need to publish the target page to make anonymous access, let assume that you have page named “x.aspx” under source site, you have to publish the page “x.aspx” under target site to make them allow for anonymous
Thanks … the steps really saved my time … especially enabling Anonymous at Site Permissions level ….
works great! thanks you!
nice posting.thank you
Great! it works on every steps! on step 6, it seems that it is the default setting, I did not make any change on step 6
hi
for users who cannot see the Anonymous Access button when extending a web application – you will need to navigate to the extended site collection to apply the final steps.
Cheers
Ash
good post. thanx.
Good, thx a lot.
Hi Everyone,
We are having a problem with SharePoint. We cannot publish an access database to SharePoint server 2010 as we get this error “An error occurred while initializing access services database.” whenever we try to publish the default contact database. By the way, we are using the single server environment (standalone). If you need more details just let me know. Any help would be appreciated guys, thanks.
Good post. Thank you!
I also found at stage 8 that I did not have the ‘Anonymous Access’ option in the Site Permissions page.
This was because I had extended a web application for anonymous access in the Internet zone, but SharePoint for some reason had extended a DIFFERENT web application to the one I had selected. So when I accessed my new URL (for the anonymous site) I was actually seeing the wrong site collection. Everything looked correct in Central Admin, though.
I ended up unextending the web application (using the drop-down on the ‘Delete’ option in the Web Applications management page of Central Admin, and selecting ‘Remove SharePoint from IIS Web Site), and then re-extending it again into the internet zone. The second time it worked properly.
Hey Guys,
For those who are experiencing trouble on step 8, make sure you are accessing the site from the “home site” not “the central administration portal”. Also you need a user with elevated rights.
Btw Thanks for the post. It really helped.
Regards
Dincer
Wonderful post…. in the same way please post how to enable forms based authentication with anonymous access.
Thank you so much
Hello & thanks for this article … i have a question about anonymous access to a list…
i have a Contact Us form in my site that insert new item to my list in public website . how can i set anonymous access to insert via this form but prevent view this list in public mode . (means user cannot see list items by typing URL of list in address bar but he/she can add item via my form)
thanks in advanced
Hello,
Just curious, does this impact pages that are locked down to certain individuals?
Just want to make sure I’m not opening the door for those accessing information they shouldn’t be.
Thank you
Thanks for a great post, however I’m encountering a problem after enabling anonymous access following the steps you described, the SharePoint web application is behaving as an anonymous site even if i’m logged in internally as an admin in my developing machine! The application considers me as a visitor. Any ideas on why this is happening?
Nice article, I also implemented the same, but in my case, the user gets the prompt for credentials to access the site, though I don’t have js, css reference to the master page.
posted the issue here in detail: https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/241066/anonymous-sharepoint-201web-application-prompting-for-credentials