EP as SSO Provider - Decoding MYSAPSSO2 using SAPSSOEXT - Introduction

[Abhijeet-K]

In a large company spread over many geographies, it gets difficult to address the requirements of all the offices centrally. This leads to fragmented procurement or development of standalone software - or these days, software services - to address local needs. For instance, many intranet applications are developed to cater for the administrative activities like complaint management, document tracking, common software downloads, event notifications or in some cases even providing some space for employees to maintain there own little pages. While having such utilities is certainly nice for all stakeholders, there are some common issues faced while managing them. Lets have a look.

• Each service / application has its own authentication credentials


• Each service / application has its own authentication interface / UI
  


• Password policies are unique to each service / application


• Password reset is a big headache for users and admins, equally


• Investing in personnel to just resolve logon issues of an service / application is undesirable


• Developers have to write authentication modules, maintain DB for each service / application


• Security aspect is overlooked as the focus is on application

The solution to these issues is very elegant, extensible and manageable, yet often ignored due to lack of consolidated information about its implementation procedure. The solution is to use SAP Enterprise Portal (EP) as the authentication provider. This blog series will try to help out all those who have EP in their ERP landscape and plan to use EP as the single point of authentication for all their intranet applications. The upcoming parts will focus on:

1. Part 1 - Architecture


2. Part 2 - Prerequisites


3. Part 3 - J2EE Application to decode MYSAPSSO2 using SAPSSOEXT libraries


4. Part 4 - Demo

Stay tuned!