The Sikh Geek

There are some really good new articles from MSDN looking at Forms Based Authentication on Sharepoint, which are linked to on the Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Team Blog.

There are a couple of caveats that I’ve come across with FBA and they are :-

• The Sharepoint index crawler/search facility does not work with FBA, so you have to extend the Web Application and use this zone for Windows Authentication and set your content source to point to this extended web application. An extended web application still uses the same content databases as your original application.
• Sharepoint Designer doesn’t authenticate against FBA so again you need the above for this.

I passed the final exam today on MOSS 2007 and so I’m a Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist (MCTS) on Sharepoint now. There were two exams during the course, one on WSS 3.0 and the other on MOSS 2007. I learnt loads more about Sharepoint which hopefully I’ll be able to put to good use on future projects. I fancy doing the developer course now with Combined Knowledge.

One of the things that I’m currently working on at the moment is implementing MOSS 2007 for a customer which will act as the main website and also provide extranet capabilities to those users who register for the site. One of the authentication methods I’ve been looking at is Forms Based Authentication where the login details of a user are stored in the backend SQL Server. Sounds straighforward doesn’t? One of the enhancements of WSS 3.0 (upon which MOSS 2007 is based) over WSS 2.0 is the multiple authentication providers you can have. The obvious ones are NTLM or Kerberos and when in a domain environment then this is the easiest. If you’re going to be authenticating from the Internet then using AD is going to mean that you’re going to get that grey box popping up for username and password - not very pretty and not considered best practice for a web application. Implementing FBA is a non-trivial task (as I have found out), as it’s not documented in detail when coming from the Internet Zone (zones are a WSS 3.0 term).

I’m pleased to say that I have finally got this working and intend to document this more fully at a later stage as there are some good blog posts out there defining the process but miss a few key points. Whilst doing things like this can be like banging your head against a brick wall, it’s taught me a lot about how MOSS 2007 is configured and works. It is an amazing product and the job done on the Central Administration is fantastic. I’m only scratching the surface of MOSS 2007 but it’s an amazingly flexible product and I can see why larger organisations are falling over themselves to deploy it.