I’m on a Single Sign-On quest. I won’t be happy with my working knowledge of Community Server until I can integrate Community Server Authentication with other methods first hand. Some other quest will surely follow when this one's done, but for now my latenight geek hours are commited to the goal of setting up three Community Server 2.0 sites with Single Sign-On using Windows Authentication, ASP.NET Forms, and Custom Cookie authentication.
The docs on the Single Sign-On CS Add-ons are actually very good. If they are read at face value, a lot of the confusion in implementing SSO can be eliminated. Looking at the first statement on the general description page, for instance, it says,
"Community Server single sign-on modules enable you to integrate Community Server with any authentication system
employed by your current site."
That's the simple trick to making Single Sign-On work and explaining what it does: it integrates CS authentication with an existing site authentication model.
The quest began this afternoon. My http://cscookies, http://csforms and http://cswindows sites are created and ready to go. The parent http://cscookies cookie management code is written and ready to install CS in an application subdirectory. ASP.NET forms setup at http://csforms will be next, maybe yet tonight. Windows authentication in http://cswindows is strictly an IIS configuration issue, so nothing to do in the parent application for it.
Here's a screenshot of the cookies root, where the Custom Cookies Security authentication will be managed to pass various accounts to the CS application by way of the shared cookie. The ASP.NET Forms authenticating parent at http://csforms will have similarly simplistic logic to test passing various accounts to the CS application.
I'll chronicle the quest as I go. For now I'll make sure the parent authentication is in place for Cookies and Forms and then we'll look at the process of installing CS in application folders and melding the authentication with the parent apps in perfect harmony.
And enlightenment followed him.[tags: Community Server]