The SharePoint Federated Identity Process – Part 1 – Introduction

* Throughout this series, Adam Buenz’s Software House  is a medium sized company using Active Directory to authenticate. ARB Security Solutions is a customer of Adam Buenz’s Software House, buying….you know software from them. *

The desire for a business to share various types of resources with others is very common. Yet each business has a different method in place for taking care of issues including security, authentication, and their directory services. Through the use of federated identity though we are able to get passed such barriers. It allows employees to have a standard type of credential that they use to log on to a network.

Let’s put this idea into practice shall we? The basis will be a business known as Adam Buenz’s Software House. We will be exploring how it allows ARB Security Solutions, one of its customers, to share various types of resources through the use of federated identity.

Adam Buenz’s Software House has SSO for the employees to use, so we can move on to the next step in the process. The customers are asking to have an software component order program in place so they can track the progress of what people have ordered from start to finish, hosted in SharePoint. They want it to operate like a SharePoint application that is in their own domain. The sales manager wants to be able to log on using the credentials that ARB Security Solutions has provided him with to do so.

Through such a process, he will have the same access to the information as employees of Adam Buenz’s Software House have. However, the manger of ARB Security Solutions won’t need to have any special credentials in order for this to happen. Adam Buenz’s Software House allows this because they don’t want the responsibility of maintaining any account for another company that happens to be using one of its applications.

• SharePoint Federated Identity Environment Requirements
• Exploring the SharePoint Federated Identity Solution
• The Benefits and Limitations of SharePoint Identity Federation