Claims

SharePoint 2013

Using SharePoint 2013 with Thinktecture IdentityServer 2

Introduction SharePoint 2013 (and earlier versions) allows you to use alternative authentication “sources” than Windows. We can part from the different options with Windows login, use Forms Based Authentication (FBA) or use a federated/trusted identity provider. Forms based authentication is a good approach if you don’t want to manage your users in Active Directory or if you don’t want to use Windows Login. The downside with FBA is that you must manually do some web.config modifications, there isn’t any UI for managing the users (yes, I know you can use LDAP or just download something from the tubez, but you get my point). Using a federated approach is more interesting, that allows you to get the identity management and authentication away from your SharePoint farm (and this is a really good thing, SharePoint admins are generally not identity management people!). A trusted identity provider is a service such as Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), Microsoft Azure Access Control Services (ACS) or any other SAML 1.1 compatible Identity Provider (IdP).

SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013 with SAML Claims and Provider Hosted Apps

Introduction The other week I posted an article about how to use SharePoint Hosted Apps when using SAML Claims, I did not expect that amount of feedback I had on that blog post, in e-mail, comments, tweets etc. Some of that feedback was how do you do it with Provider Hosted apps. Well you’re about to find out. It took me a while to get it properly done and there are some things that you should be aware of. In this post I will walk you through the simplest scenario and you will notice that there are a couple of moving parts. But, since I am such an influencer I thought I should make it easier for you. I will show you how to do this without the minimal changes to your current provider hosted apps – you only have to add an extension file to your solution, make a small modification to the helper files that Visual Studio gives you and a couple of web.config modifications! All the code you need will be published in a Github repository (https://github.com/wictorwilen/SharePointContextSaml) for you to consume and do all the fancy gitty stuff that you code dweebs out there like.

SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013 with SAML Claims and SharePoint Hosted Apps

Introduction By now each and every SharePoint developer out there should spend their time building SharePoint Apps instead of the old trusted friend of ours; Full Trust Code. Ok, Apps doesn’t solve the equivalent of world hunger in SharePoint at the moment, but that’s a discussion for another time. I assume you get my point. We have two types of apps (we used to have three little monkeys jumping in the bed, but one just bumped his head); Provider hosted apps and SharePoint hosted apps. Without going into details, Provider hosted apps are the apps that are hosted outside of SharePoint on a specific location (URL) and SharePoint hosted apps are running on top of SharePoint (using JavaScript) on a “random” location. This location is called the App Web and is a SharePoint SPWeb with a specific randomly generated URL. That URL could look something like this: