RSS Reader, Claims Authentication and Kerberos

In a demo I was helping to set up last week, I had to configure an RSS Reader web part to read an RSS Feed from MySite (The Activity Feed, to be precise). Back in SharePoint 2007, you could not use the OTB RSS Feed Reader web part without running Kerberos, and the same goes for 2010.

However, as it was demo time I also wanted to give us the flexibility of switching to another authentication provider if we got the chance to demo it (eg Live ID) – to do so once it's initially provisioned requires 4-5 lines of PowerShell script:

If you have not loaded the "SharePoint Powershell Window", you'll need to run 

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell

Then to switch to Claims Auth:

$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication http://mywebapp
$webApp.UseClaimsAuthentication = 1;
$webApp.Update()
$webApp.ProvisionGlobally() 
$webApp.MigrateUsers($True)

And to revert back to Classic mode authentication just change the 1 to a 0 :

$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication http://mywebapp
$webApp.UseClaimsAuthentication = 0;
$webApp.Update()
$webApp.ProvisionGlobally() 
$webApp.MigrateUsers($True)

Too easy!