DevConnections - Forms Authentication
I attended a good session with Rick Taylor from Microsoft this morning on FBA (Forms Based Authentication) in SharePoint. This session had a particular interest to me because we have done quite of a but FBA implementations for our clients. It has turned out to be more popular than we originally thought it would be.
A couple of key pieces of information came out of this session that a lot of people not familiar with FBA might find useful. First, My Sites are compatible with FBA. There is some setup and planning that needs to be done because a single Web Application can only have a single Membership Provider, so mixing and matching My Sites with Windows Authentication will not be possible in the same Web Application, but you can architect some solutions that hopefully get what you need.
For those of you who struggle with managing your user database when using the .NET 2.0 security database as your primary FBA user store, the IW community is releasing a generic import tool. I don't know any more than that, and will post when I get some firm information, but my assumption is that this tool can read from your Active Directory forest to import user data into your FBA database. This should be an interesting tool for those looking for an FBA site with corporate users accessing it, possibly alongside external users.
Speaking of user management, CodePlex has an FBA user and role management application that installs into your existing WSS/MOSS environment as a solution. We have used this application and it does a pretty good job of giving you an interface to your ASP.NET security database from within SharePoint. It still had some bugs when we tried it, but it's a great start. http://www.codeplex.com/fba
Rick also talked briefly about how to use FBA with the Out of the Box Web Services available in WSS. The basics include the Authentication Web Service new for WSS 3.0 which allow you to create an authentication cookie to send with subsequent requests to the Web Service. This requires Client Integration to be turned ON for your FBA Web Application.
I'm still leaving stuff out, but it was a good session, thanks Rick!
-Ryan