SharePoint inherently provides authenticated user access and permissions control for users in a local Active Directory (AD) Forest in the same domain. But increasingly SharePoint access must be provided to users whose accounts are hosted in multiple directories (both AD and other technology vendors) outside the immediate domain.
Epok Edition for Microsoft SharePoint was designed to support SharePoint access from a user population distributed through a heterogeneous directory environment to solve the problem of providing information and collaboration to a large distributed audience. Typically user directories are in different security domains from the SharePoint deployment, and cannot be used because:
· An AD trust relationship with the remote directory is undesirable
· An ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) link is undesirable
· It is an LDAP directory from another technology vendor (Sun, Novell, Fedora etc)
· It is against policy to provide directory access (port 389) through a firewall
· It is impractical to implement a Federated Identity relationship between the directories
Epok has taken advantage of the Forms authentication extension point provided by the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework for externalizing SharePoint authentication. Epok Edition for Microsoft SharePoint includes custom membership and role providers for authenticating and authorizing users into MOSS2007 so that they are provided with a personal account within MOSS2007 without being a member of the local AD.
Epok Federated Access Manager technology (the underlying framework for Epok Edition for MicrosoftSharePoint) can be configured to permit users to authenticate natively against their local/home directory system, and then be credentialed to allow cross-domain access to SharePoint with the method above. Outof-band establishment of trust relationships ensure strong security, and yet are dynamic and quickly configured to suit changing business environments. Federated Access Manager technology only requires standard HTTP/HTTPS (80/443) ports to be open on any firewalls.
Full audit records are maintained for all cross-domain user access for security monitoring and compliance.