ASP.NET 2.0 Forms Authentication and Active Directory Installation

Earlier this week, I've posted an article on this subject and it can be found on the Jumptree Blog.

Overall, I went through the steps from setting up up Active directory to how ASP.NET authenticates against the new setup. I always find it is more clear to developers  if we know how the system works behind the scene.

As we all know, larger size corporations and agencies normally uses Active Directory to manage their internal users for various of reasons. Personally, because we are a small shop and the contracts we've dealt with were mostly in hosting environments, such we never had the need to look into supporting Active Directory. However, this has changed ever since Jumptree were being tested in such environments. We realized by providing the support for such authentication is essential to expanding our customer basis.

I mentioned at the end of the article, there are still much to be done. The reason is it's very often to have multiple Active Directories within an organization and users are spread through out the multiples domains.  We need to research further on how to authenticate the proper domain based on user's selection in addition to build the proper admin module for multiple domain registrations.

In addition, we find that a lot of organizations also use "SiteMinder" from Computer Associates for authentication. This makes it very interesting and it appears at least to us that only very huge organizations use "SiteMinder" and yet, the resources on ASP.NET 2.0 / SiteMinder integration is rare to find. We are doing research on this subject as well and when I do find out how to do this, I will write another article following up on this subject. If any of you know anything on this subject or would like to learn about it, definitely let me know.

Anyway, hope the article helps some of the .NET developers out there on with Active directory / Forms Authentication development issues.

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