Enabling or Disabling Claims Based Authentication

If you have already provisioned a Web Application then it may not be immediately obvious how to change the authentication over to Claims (or revert back to Classic) as this cannot be done within the GUI and can only be done within PowerShell.

Note : To do this you will need to load PowerShell and the SharePoint 2010 snap-in.

To Enable Claims :

$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication "http://webapplicationurl"
$webApp.UseClaimsAuthentication = 1;
$webApp.Update()

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

$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication "http://webapplicationurl"
$webApp.UseClaimsAuthentication = 0;
$webApp.Update()

Fairly easy, but not immediately obvious 🙂