NetCommunity as an Identity Provider for Single Sign On Service

Montana Arble · February 2013

We would like to leverage our NetCommunity as an identity provider for our single sign on solution. Has anyone else had a similar request?

In a perfect world this would eliminate the need to provide our users with multiple username and passwords for our different service offerings.

Jaime Lassman 2 · February 2013

I think this would be great. Now that I'm using more and more 3rd party products to extend the function of the BBNC site, we have more logins than before. As I add Google calendars, 3rd party photo tools, and possibly a 3rd party blogging solution, SSO would be a big addition to what BBNC brings.

A while back I looked into SSO from NetCommunity, but the cost was prohibitive. I'd love to see this become easier and perhaps something we could manage on our own without an additional development cost.

Karen Badham · February 2013

Hey Montana,

Here's the Knowledgebase article about SSO when it comes to doing this between NetCommunity and third party software. Doing this is not supported, but all that means is it's not covered under your maintenance to get assistance with it. But it's certainly a possible thing to do

http://www.blackbaud.com/kb/index?pag... That solution should get you pointed in the right direction.

Thanks!

Karen

Montana Arble · February 2013

Hello Karen,

Thank you for the link! Just today I had spoke with a Blackbaud support rep who indicated that NetCommunity cannot be an authenticating authority to 3rd party websites. I'm not sure if this conflicts with NC's SSO features that you linked too.

In a ideal scenario I'd have something like this

NetCommunity User -> Central Authentication Service (IE. Jasig CAS [http://www.jasig.org/cas]) -> Other service that supports CAS

Is this what the NC SSO functionality geared towards or is intended for the social media authentication?

Thanks again for your input,

Montana

Karen Badham · February 2013

Hey Montana,

What you describe is what it's intended for. So as an example people that have two websites, one main website and NetCommunity for specific pages (donation, event, etc) and they want users to not have separate logins.

I've never seen someone use it for social media, though I assume that's possible too. I know when it comes to social media there's more you'd have to do (maybe pay for custom code?) since you obviously wouldn't have full control over the social media site (twitter, facebook, whatever).

Thanks!

Karen

Ron Steiner · February 2013

It appears as though the KB cited above is for the situation where a user is logged in somewhere else and seeks to land on a BBNC page. What I believe Montana wants (and certainly what I want) is for a user to authenticate to BBNC and then, with identity preserved (by passing Education Edge Student ID, Raiser's Edge Constituent ID or BBNC user ID) access another website, with that website knowing who has logged in so it can present user-specific information. We'd like to use it for a student (or parent) to log in to NetCommunity (NetClassroom) and then go out of BBNC to, say, Naviance (a college information site that has student-specific information), for example. Naviance supports SSO; we just need a way of passing them information in the URL string to identify the BBNC user. Anyone done this?

Matt Nichols · February 2013

It sounds like the "Outgoing Single Sign-on" configuration outlined on pages 8-11 of the Single Sign-on Overview Guide at https://www.blackbaud.com/files/suppo... is what Ron and Montana are looking for.

To implement this functionality, your third-party CMS will need to be able to return a target URL and a few parameters in a query string to an ASHX handler in the BBNC API.

Stead Halstead · February 2013

We're interested in this too! Single sign on, either via Jasig CAS or BBNC, then passing on to Moodle or other services would be awesome!

NetCommunity as an Identity Provider for Single Sign On Service

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