Enabling Custom Authentication for SharePoint 2007

One of the sore limitations of SharePoint 2003 was its obsessive/compulsive disorder to use Windows Authentication, only Windows Authentication, and nothing but Windows Authentication. This caused a typical Catch-22 in most implementations. Larger organizations that needed the collaboration features of SharePoint frequently had a pre-existing sign-on mechanism, to which SharePoint 2003 was completely blind. They could put an ISAPI filter in front of SharePoint 2003's ISAPI filter to fake the authentication, but then SharePoint wouldn't integrate with ASP.NET—a less-than-ideal solution.

SharePoint 2007 is changing all that. In SharePoint 2007, you can use any membership provider to enable custom authentication. This article discusses how to switch the membership provider on a SharePoint Web application. Of course, you could write your own membership provider, but to keep things simple, this article uses the AspNetSqlMembershipProvider that ships with the .NET Framework 2.0.

Before diving into the details, however, take a quick crash course on how SharePoint runs on a machine.

Continue to "SharePoint 2007 Installation: A Quick Rundown..."

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