Never again!
Writing a computer book is a challenging experience! Finding a cool and interesting topic is not too hard. But after the first wave of enthusiasm about your “new project”, there’s always that phase where you have to drag yourself down into the basement after a day's work and putting the children to bed. It is common to become occasionally bogged down with your writing, but in the computer book field it is made worse because of the fairly tight schedule computer books are usually produced under. I went through this experience now several times, and it is about just three years since I finished the Developer’s Guide to SAP NetWeaver Security. So I swore to high heaven (this includes my wife as well!) that this was really the last time I spent endless hours writing chapter after chapter during the week and – the more towards the end of the schedule – on the weekends, no matter how great it is holding a new book in my hands when it finally got published!
… OK – one more time!
Well, what should I say! It was a cold winter day in December last year when that email from my editor at SAP PRESS reached my desk, asking about a second edition of the Developer’s Guide. Being torn between the promise I made and many new ideas in my head, I finally came up with the following proposal:
- First and most important: I needed help – help from security experts who are enthusiastic and crazy enough to join this new project. And I was happy to find them! Martijn de Boer, Mathias Essenpreis and Stefanie García Laule were spontaneously inspired by the idea. We’ve worked closely on many security projects and shared a lot of experience from customer engagements and sessions at SAP TechEd.
- The second edition should focus on a particular security topic in the Developer’s Guide. The new author team quickly agreed that Single Sign-on (SSO) was obviously the best candidate. Most of the product development efforts in Security and Identity Management at SAP went into this area in the last three years. The new technology is already available or about to be released for general availability by then end of the year, and customer’s demand to learn more about SSO and related topics such as Identity Management and Federation has never been greater. We also felt that the time has come to compile the various technologies and scenarios for SSO covering existing and new releases into one book that serves as a “single point of truth”.
Following the basic concept of the Developer’s Guide, we wrote a very practical book with many examples and screenshots. However, since there is so much new stuff in it, “Single Sign-on mit SAP” actually became less a second edition of the old book than more a brand new book (please, don’t tell my wife!).
So what’s in it?
After a bit of theory behind SSO, Identity Federation and the technologies available with SAP, many workshop chapters show you how “hands-on” how to design and develop a secure SSO solution based on established industry standards - across platform and organizational boundaries. You learn how to integrate your Java, ABAP and Microsoft .NET-based applications with SAP systems in an existing SSO environment. Whether you want to implement the examples step by step or need a reference guide on SSO with SAP: Our goal was that you'll find it in this book!
Ranging from older releases (4.6C) to latest technologies, the workshops cover a broad spectrum of SSO scenarios:
- SNC-based Kerberos integration with SAP GUI
- Webbrowser SSO using Digital Certificates, SAML 2.0, SPNEGO and OpenID
- SSO with SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (PI), Application Server ABAP and Business Process Management (BPM) based on Webservices
- Integration with Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2.0, Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS), SAP Trust Center Services and Enterprise Service Frameworks like Apache Axis and Sun Metro.
More information about the book, the complete table of contents and excerpts from chapters 2 ("SSO-Technologien und -Standards") and 4 („Workshops: Browser-Single-Sign-on mit Zertifikaten") can be found on the book homepage. The english translation is planned for Q2 2011.
A long journey
After 9 months, 380 pages and many, many coffees, Martijn, Mathias, Stefanie and I can truly say that we had great fun writing this book. Much to our surprise we found that the book made it straight after one week into the SAP PRESS Top 10 bestsellers – this deserves a big “Thank you!” to all our readers who made this possible and we hope that you enjoy reading “Single Sign-on mit SAP”!
Martijn de Boer, Mathias Essenpreis, Stefanie García Laule and Martin Raepple
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