We work in Oracle, and we “eat our dog food” to use the Oracle Single Sign On. As we work towards providing Opensocial capabilities to our internal networking site (Connect), we find that Opensocial fits very well with SSO within the corporate domain.
So, how does SSO help opensocial apps? Well, if the backend of the opensocial app is also SSO enabled, it gives hugh benefits. Every employees has a single-sign on account, and once the user logs on into Connect, he/she is authenticated across all services. Every time when an open social app requests data from its own backend, Connect acts as a proxy and forward the request along with the user credentials to the backend server, and the user is already authenticated. The SSO account basically serves as an Open ID, and there is even no need for an OAuth token exchange. I personally find this very cool and it really leverages the power of SSO. This gives users much better user experience, less hassle in signing on again and again through the OAuth service if you require security, and it saves users time and key strokes.
For the backend servers that support open social apps, SSO serves as the authentication mechanism. Such backend service no longer needs to worry about adding additional layers of security as long as they verify the request is legitimate and do come from a server it trusts.
Not only that, for open social apps, normally they need to keep a mapping between the user id of the opensocial site and their own internal ids. In addition, there is no mechanism of knowing the true identity of their friends other than knowing their user ids of the opensocial site and their names. With SSO, the picture flips around. By using the single-sign on user id, it is globally unique across all sites, and you can even use LDAP to look up more details regarding to a particular user. There is no need for a user id mapping, and you know the true identity of the user. If you have data currently exists that is related to the user, you can also choose to present these additional information to him/her as well. Google is trying to identify users through the Social Graph API over the convoluted Internet, but we get this for free and in a very simple elegant manner within the firewall.
Potentially Similar Posts
- Deploy OpenSocial Locally with a Sample Network
- OpenSocial’izing Our Apps
- Implementing Oracle SSO in a generic java container? It is not as easy as you think.
- Another Call for OpenSocial App Thoughts
- What OpenSocial Apps Do You Want?
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 0 people and commented on 0 times 
Add New Comment
Viewing 4 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Add New Comment
Trackbacks
(Trackback URL)