Overcoming Challanges As a Team - Migrating to Google Apps

Google Enterprise reached out to us regarding a University that was looking to move to Google Apps from Domino.  We met with our client and gathered the scope of the of the project which included moving approximately 15,000 students and faculty.  It also included some Single Sign-On (SSO) technology that needed to work with existing student systems.  SSO solutions are commonly used at the intranet level, but extending these solutions beyond the intranet and into the cloud has been problematic and has led to the proliferation of non-interoperable proprietary technologies.  Therefore, one of the challenges in creating Single Sign-On system for our client was using their existing student credentials for signing on without having to manage user-names and passwords within Google.

 

Our solution was to synchronize users from active client's directory into Google Apps using a LDAP sync and then implementing Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) to pass credentials.  SAML served as a standard for exchanging authentication and authorization between security domains; that is, between an identity provider, Google, and a service provider, our client. 

 

Using our client's existing web pages, we had to pass the credentials to Google and create the custom code in the background to take a user name and password from our client's website and pass it to Google to allow accreditation to occur.  We worked with their team to implement SAML and developed custom code in order for SAML to work with their existing student portals.

 

Our solution helped our client's end users to be able to access all services provided with the same user-name and password being able to log-in and access Google.  Our team, in collaboration with our client managed to successfully migrate directory services to Google without causing end user confusion.

 

Comments

[bluess]

Thank you very much. I am Cheap Designer Shoeswonderring if i can share your article in the bookmarks of society，Then more friends can talk about this problem.