Sun Microsystems 2005Q1 manual Implementing Single Sign-On, Portal Desktop Design

Identity and Directory Structure Design

See the Portal Server 6 Administration Guide, Directory Server Deployment Guide, and the Access Manager Deployment Guide for more information on planning your Access Manager and Directory Server structure.

Implementing Single Sign-On

Single sign-on (SSO) to Portal Server is managed by Access Manager. SSO provides a user with the ability to use any application that has its access policy managed by Access Manager, if allowed through the policy. The user need not re-authenticate to that application.

Various SSO scenarios include:

•Portal web application. The authentication comes from Access Manager, and the application validates the user credentials with Access Manager

•Standalone web application. The application is hosted on a separate web container, and the Access Manager Web Agent is used for authenticationAccess Manager. This does not require application coding. Additionally, you can modify the application to validate against Access Manager directly.

•Standalone Java application. In this scenario, you modify the application to validate user credentials against Access Manager directly.

•Non-Access Manager aware application. In this scenario an application stores a user’s credentials and provides them as needed. However, this is not an ideal SSO solution, as the user needs to re-authenticate if credentials change.

Portal Desktop Design

The performance of Portal Server itself largely depends upon how fast individual channels perform. In addition, the user experience of the portal is based upon the speed with which the Portal Desktop is displayed. The Portal Desktop can only load as fast as the slowest displayed channel. For example, consider a Portal Desktop composed of ten channels. If nine channels are rendered in one millisecond but the tenth takes three seconds, the Portal Desktop does not appear until that tenth channel is processed by the portal. By making sure that each channel can process a request in the shortest possible time, you provide a better performing Portal Desktop.

128 Portal Server 6 2005Q1 • Deployment Planning Guide