Extranet-Centric Single-Sign-On

You’re ready to expand your use of Click Commerce into multiple modules (or perhaps you already have) and have elected to separate them into more than one physical server. That’s great! there are a lot of good reasons to do so. Perhaps you have different development teams for the different solutions who work on different release schedules, or you want to align the different servers across organizational lines (Human Research, Animal Research, and Grants, for example), or you’re simply taking a pragmatic approach to managing your continued expansion. Whatever the reason, the approach is becoming increasingly common; especially as the number of deployed Click Commerce modules increases.

Now that you have made that choice, you now need to address all of the little integration issues. One such issue is how to streamline authentication such that a user doesn’t have to login to each server. For those of you who have implemented a Single-Sign-On (SSO) solution such as Shibboleth or CA SiteMinder, this issue is already handled. But what if you don’t have an Institution-wide SSO implementation? Whether you take advantage of Delegated Authentication to an external credential source such as Active Directory or LDAP or are using Click Commerce Extranet’s built-in authentication engine, your users will typically have to login to each site.

I recently completed some work for a customer to eliminate this hassle by allowing one Extranet-based site to be used as the SSO authentication source for any other Extranet-based site. The implementation is simple enough to apply to other sites such as your own that I thought I'd share it with you. As this implementation deals with security related subject matter, I’m going to ask you to continue reading about this new capability on ClickCommerce.com. Sorry for the inconvenience, but better to keep secret stuff just between us. As an added bonus, I’ve packaged the entire implementation into a download that you can use for your own sites. In the download you will find an explanation of the implementation, requirements, and installation instructions.

As always, I’d love to hear how this works out for you.

Cheers!