Showing posts with label Indentity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Indentity. Show all posts

Sunday 11 December 2016

Extranet Authentication Options for SharePoint 2013

Overview: Most large enterprises using SharePoint have implement Extranet solutions and these vary in complexity greatly.  Many implementation I have seen have morphed into bazaar solutions generally due to the tactical solutions implemented over time and were not caused by poor architecture.  It is the nature of these projects to get something out and with the rapid change in authentication over the past 5 years tons of business have landed in complex scenarios.

Office 365 has grown quickly and using Office 365 is generally a good idea however a lot of organisations still are resistant due to a variety of concerns such as regulatory compliance and trust.  Microsoft is definitely removing these barriers and I'd lean towards hosting the SharePoint Extranet in the cloud in the majority of situations.  The biggest barriers to moving to the cloud are Executive level buy in followed by senior IT folks that are bias to sticking to what they knew 10 years ago.   So a lot of the change is around education and providing a clear road-map.  The biggest technical hurdle will be around identify management.

Pretty much every organisation I deal with used Active Directory and then you may have a Federation Service normally ADFS.  You may have you external users in the same AD, a dedicate DMZ AD, or any other user directory including SQL or other LDAP provider.

Using Office 365/SharePoint Online I need to get both my internal and external users to be work with Office 365 and depending on the client setup I need to work thru both scenarios and think about the ramifications.

Note:  Ramifications are: resetting user passwords, does search work for all users and where does the data reside.

Possible Options:
  • AzureAD - Azures ACS for user accounts
  • Federated Identifies - use ADFS and build trust with ACS, identity and password is under our company control
  • AD sync to AzureAD - Think DirSyng, tooling is ADConnect
On an on-prem. SharePoint farm, the following Authentication methods are supported at the Web Application Level:

  1. Classic (Windows (Basic/NTLM/Kerberos)), 
  2. CBA - Claims Based Authentication backed by either Windows Claims (Windows (Basic/NTLM/Kerberos)) or SAML Claims (ADFS or SiteMinder or Ping or ThinkTexture, ....)
  3. FBA - Forms Based Authentication, and 
  4. Anonymous (none)

Notes:
http://www.sharepointeurope.com/blog/2015/10/identity-management-in-a-saas-based-world