Posts Tagged ‘Single Sign On’

December 23rd, 2010

Single Sign On with PeopleSoft CRM & SAP HR

Integration between systems is hot these days, especially with the emerging packages like Fusion. Yet organizations are still inclined not to use them and develop their own ways of integrating. Sometimes this means totally new products, other situations you will see different packages being tied together. Is one better than the other? Not necessarily, there are several reasons for going into direction A or B.

In this post I would like to talk about a way of integrating PeopleSoft CRM with SAP HR. The requirements for this integration were the following:

  • Single Sign On between the two systems
  • PeopleSoft CRM used as HR Helpdesk on the support end of the organization
  • SAP HR for normal HR related business done by the HR department
  • Two work lists to work as one
  • SAP HR pages shown within PeopleSoft CRM as it was one application

Several options were investigated and the final decision made was to use an Open Source application called Central Authentication Server (CAS) as the point of single entry and single sign on solution. This package supports several ways of interacting with applications about user credentials.

For the more graphically minded people:

The way CAS works is like many other authentication systems. The user logs in using their credentials, CAS then checks that against the authorization package configured within itself (note – CAS is an Authentication service, it does not regulate your authorization). When the user credentials are good, a ticket is initialized and the user is sent to the default application tied to CAS. The application the user is being redirected to then checks if a valid ticket is present with CAS. When this checks out, the application lets the user in and CAS removes the token so that it can’t be used for a second time.