November 20, 2008 06:30 PM
November 20, 2008 08:30 PM
October 30, 2008 12:00 AM
ABSTRACT:
The greatest advancement that SharePoint 2007 has made over its predecessor is not any of its new features, look & feel, back-end and front-end extensibility, or even AJAX and workflow support. Rather, it is the fact that is directly built on top of ASP.NET 2.0, and behaves as any such normal web application should behave. This really opens designers and developers up to applying all of the functionality that is expected in any web site we might build to a SharePoint portal. This includes Master Pages, a huge range of SQL providers, IIS integration, and a greatly simplified process to deploying custom SharePoint functionality via Features and Solutions. This allows SharePoint to serve in new collaboration paradigms, beyond its niche as an intranet solution. Unheard of in the 2003 version, it is becoming more and more common to see 2007 (WSS or MOSS) running extranets, shopping carts, and even public-facing websites. In fact, Microsoft.com is all SharePoint behind the scenes! The most common situation we’ve seen is where internal users (employees stored in Active Directory) and external users (clients stored in SQL Server) come together to collaborate on projects. SharePoint provides the out-of-the-box infrastructure that very naturally supports this: a hierarchical structure (web sites), a UI (web pages and parts), and persistence (semi-structured data in documents or fully-relational data in lists and tables). However, it breaks down when it comes to authentication. The standard implementation is to have different web sites for different users that serve the same data. The problem is that, first of all, we now have to deploy UI content in multiple places. Furthermore, internal and external users cannot be in the same security groups! So with AD and SQL users, our SharePoint administrators need to maintain two environments to make it all work. In order to solve this problem, Catalyst Software Solutions has created the Hybrid Provider. The Hybrid Provider is an installable authentication mechanism that supports heterogeneous users to log into the same physical web application! This way, we only have one web application to maintain, and we can open it up to everyone! The internal workings of the Hybrid Provider basically leverage existing ASP.NET 2.0 technologies that SharePoint already works with, and wires them all together. These include the SQL Membership and Profile infrastructures, Active Directory providers, and the ASP.NET 2.0 SQL account user controls. After digging deep into the technical details of the Hybrid Provider, I’ll show a demo of the new installer (written in WPF) that shows how easily it can be installed – and uninstalled – from different web applications throughout your farm. Using this technology, organizations can build their extranets with all of the benefits SharePoint offers to this end, with the addition of heterogeneous authentication!
BIO: Chris Domino