Achieving single-sign-on (Samuel)

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:43:13 GMT

Our software supports external Membership Provider integration (e.g. the default SqlMembershipProvider that comes with ASP.NET) and we also provide a Membership Provider for our forum software for you to use on your own site (details).

One challenge you will face is how to achieve single-sign-on across your site and forum, i.e. once a user is logged on at the forum, he should be recognized by your site, and vice versa. Here is how:

Achieving Single-Sign-On:

In order to achieve single sign on, in addition to using your (or our) membership provider, you will need to enable cookie based forms authentication for your site, as the forum uses forms authentication to recognize logged in users.
In order to get the forms authentication ticket to be recognized on both the forum and your site, you need to make sure that in both web.config files:
- forms authentication cookie's name, protection, path are the same.
- you have identical machine key specified (validationKey, validation, decryptionKey)
  - You can go to your AdminCP -> System Related Options -> Basic Maintenance to generate machine key.

That's it. It shouldn't take more than 5 min to do the above.

Alternatively, you can read this article on creating a custom Forms Authentication Cookie for forum if your site configuration does not allow the above.