"Federating to Salesforce CRM with OpenSSO" explains how to simultaneously control access to in-house applications and those hosted by the software as a service (SaaS) provider Salesforce by using OpenSSO. SaaS, a way of delivering applications over the Internet, employs a delivery model in which a commercial vendor develops the software, hosts its operations, provides Internet-based access, and supports applications for its end users and customers.

Salesforce CRM software offers on-demand tools for software as a service (SaaS), the paper explains, adding the example of those for automating sales data and processes, customer service and support, and channel management (see www.salesforce.com for more information about the Salesforce products). Salesforce supports federated SSO using SAML 1.0 or 2.0 and can be easily configured for federated SSO with OpenSSO.

As popular services such as Salesforce CRM, Google Apps, and Twitter increase in usage, enterprises are finding it essential to extend in-house access-management infrastructure to also protect partner applications and SaaS services, the paper notes. With OpenSSO identity federation, enterprises can share digital identities across multiple domains, thereby allowing employees to access SaaS services, such as Salesforce CRM, with their enterprise credentials. This, the paper notes, allows enterprises to reduce the number of sign-ons and enable access to the Salesforce CRM using an employee’s enterprise log-in credentials rather than their Salesforce credentials, offering security and convenience in one package.

Salesforce offers SSO service based on Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), the paper points out, adding that the service provides partner companies control over the authorization and authentication of hosted user accounts that can access Web-based applications. Using the SAML federation standards-based model, OpenSSO acts as an identity provider and Salesforce acts as the service provider. OpenSSO controls user names, passwords, and other information used to identify, authenticate, and authorize users for access to Salesforce services.

According to the authors, federating with Salesforce using OpenSSO is very simple. One of the innovative features of OpenSSO is its workflow wizards, which walk you through common configuration tasks. This article provides instruction on how to configure OpenSSO to federate to Salesforce CRM using the OpenSSO Salesforce workflow wizard. It also provides details on how to configure Salesforce CRM to communicate with OpenSSO.

To complete Salesforce CRM federation, you will need to:

• Satisfy Integration Prerequisites
• Configure OpenSSO and Salesforce CRM for Federation
• Verify the Single Sign On Setup

Detailed instructions for accomplishing the above steps are provided.

More Information

Sun OpenSSO Enterprise Main page

Sun OpenSSO Express

Salesforce Training

Federating with Google Apps [...read more...]

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