Integrating Open Source Software to Meet Your Needs

I have been working with open source software since 2003; first with MamboOS in 2003 (the predecessor of Joomla!), Moodle, Wordpress, Zimbra, uPortal, and other open source products. Many times the installations that I have done have been in educational organizations where there is a need to simplify the user's experience and allow for less complicated access. Let's say that we have a Joomla! site as your main portal; your teachers, parents and students have login accounts to this system. You now want to grant access to that same user group to your Moodle installation. You don't want them to have to first login to Joomla! and then go to Moodle to login to that separate system; what to do? In comes the single sign-on method.

Single Sign-On

What is single sign-on (SSO)? It is where many systems share common user names, passwords and profiles. This allows for a user to login once, and access all their profiles across separate systems. There are several different ways to accomplish this, depending on the complexity of your integration. Many open source software applications have bridge plugins that allow for linking user account information for use between the systems. For instance, you can have a user on an email server, such as Zimbra, and authenticate your Joomla! or Moodle installation against the Zimbra LDAP service. More complicated networks may need a more robust authentication service such as Jasig CAS. CAS (Central Authentication Service) is an authentication system created by Yale University to provide a trusted way for an application to authenticate a user. CAS became a Jasig project in December 2004. Many open source software applications as well as close source applications are CAS enabled such as Moodle, TikiWiki, uPortal, Active Directory, RADIUS and other authentication mechanisms. For more information on CAS visit the Jasig CAS project page. 

Single Sign-On Benefits

Centralized password management, cross system compatibility, consolidation of login services and simplified user access are a few key benefits for implementing SSO. Your organization just may not have to man-power to manage a user group on multiple systems, or you want your users to have an easier experience logging into the many services you wish to offer. In some cases, SSO may not be the best fit for your needs, but it does give you the option to help reduce the sign-on and authentication of your users. 

SSO Draw-backs

 Some things to think about when evaluating SSO are:

• "Keys to the castle" - in the case where the user credentials are available to multiple users, misuse of logon credentials to access connected systems can happen.
• Greater authentication methods may be needed such as smart card or single use password tokens may be used on the initial sign-in procedure.
• The authentication system now becomes highly critical in the availability of the services included in the SSO configuration. If the SSO system goes down, this may potentially make the other connected systems unavailable.

Read more on SSO Benefits and drawbacks at Wikipedia and IT Security Portal.

Whether or not you integrate some or all of your systems with SSO, it is just another option in making things easier and more accessible for your users. This can free up your time, money and other resources that you can be using more productively.