I have been taking Office Live for a test spin. I am not going to delve into the why or anything like that, rather I want to take the time to help out anyone else who perhaps has found a major annoyance when using Office Live. Specifically, when attempting to navigate to any page of Office Live a yellow alert like the pop-up one displayed below has the following message:
To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has blocked this website from displaying non-secure content
This is more than a little annoyance, it essentially makes Office Live unusable while navigating with Internet Explorer 7. I immediately began searching and altering security settings in hopes of making it go away, but nothing worked. I added officelive.com to my trusted sites. No dice. I added my specific subdomain of officelive.com. No again. I unchecked the need for HTTPS and put the non-HTTPs sites as trusted. The message still appeared.
I finally gave in and contacted Microsoft and received an email which in part read:
I understand you are unable to access your Microsoft Office Live website and get an error message stating ‘To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has blocked this website from displaying non-secure content’. I regret the inconvenience caused.
Benjamin, the yellow bar signifies the security warning which occurs when you are trying to view any restricted website.
The Internet Explorer takes precautionary measures to help you have a secure browsing experience. The more open you are to downloads of software and other content, the greater is your exposure to risk, for example, the risk of downloading software that could damage your data. Internet Explorer also offers three other zones, including Trusted and Restricted zones, to which you can assign Web sites that you trust completely or that arouse your suspicion.
In order to view your website within a trusted environment, please follow the steps mentioned below:
1. Click on ‘Start’ and then click on ‘Control Panel’. You will find ‘Network and Internet Connections’. Double click on it. You will find ‘Internet Options’. Double click on it.
2. Click on the ‘Security’ tab and then click on the security zone ‘Trusted sites’ under ‘Select a Web content zone to specify its security settings’.
3. Click on the ‘Sites’ button.
4. In the ‘Add this Web site to the zone’ box, type your website address. Click on ‘Add’ and Click on ‘Ok’.
You can also view a graphical representation of the above steps on the website mentioned below:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/using/howto/security/settings.mspx
Further, please note that the security warning pertains to the Internet Explorer settings of the computer trying to access the website.
The not so funny part is a) this is exactly what I had been doing and b) I had informed them that I had already taken these steps. But at least this confirmed my suspicions.
So here is the solution - are you ready? The Office Live site references Microsoft.com material for its sites. So even if you add officelive.com and all sub-domains, along with enabling both HTTP and HTTPS, you will still get this message. So, add Microsoft.com as a trusted site and you are in business. It all boils down to Microsoft embedding links to files such as stylesheets found at membercenter.office.microsoft.com/shell/styles/ollShell.css.
So again, to get rid of the "To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has blocked this website from displaying non-secure content" while using Office Live, follow the instructions above, and add officelive.com as well as microsoft.com.
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