SSO with SharePoint and SAP Portal; mix of Win + MacOS clients

[jill_diesman]

Hello experts,

We have been reading through the NetWeaver and Portal forums and have read through some of the available whitepapers, such as Unleash the Power of Single Sign-On with Microsoft and SAP by Andre Fischer, et. al., but we are still unclear about which solution will best meet our needs.

We need to implement SSO between our SharePoint system(s) and our SAP Portal system(s). Our SharePoint 2007 servers (soon to be migrated to SharePoint 2010) authenticate against Active Directory. Our SAP Portal environment (SAP NW 7.00 EhP1) also authenticates against AD (all systems in our SAP Portal landscape are on Windows 2008). SSO is already set up between the SAP Portal systems (issuer of SAP logon tickets) and the back-end SAP ERP systems.

We want to continue allowing our users to directly log on to the SAP Portal if they choose. However we now also want to allow the option for our users to perform their initial login on our SharePoint Portal.

Once logged on to SharePoint, we want to provide some convenient links within the SharePoint Portal that open a new browser Window and take the user directly inside the SAP Portal to access a specific application, without requiring the user to log on to the SAP Portal. The user should then be able to navigate around the SAP Portal as usual, as if he/she had initially logged on to the SAP Portal. For these users who initially log on to SharePoint Portal, and then get to the SAP Portal via a link from SharePoint, an SAP logon ticket must be issued to the user as well.

We have some limitations because the majority of our user population is university students: 1) We cannot assume that a useru2019s system is a member of the AD Domain; 2) Our solution must work for both Windows and Mac OS clients, running either of the currently supported Web Browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox.

I sincerely appreciate any help you can provide.

Best Regards,

Jill

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hey Jill,

Have you considered using Header Variable Authentication in the Portal login module stack and configure the variable to be whatever cookie is set by default by the Sharepoint server?

Using Header Variable Login Module (written for NW04 but procedure is unchanged for NW7):

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/68/5ddc40132a8531e10000000a1550b0/content.htm

Good read regarding SECURE use of Header Variable Authentication:

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/069eaf4b-0901-0010-6e89-d1fcceebc...

I'm assuming the Sharepoint server will set this cookie to the value of the user-id. If not, it's also pretty easy to put a reverse proxy in front of the Portal and script something to set a custom header variable.

-Kevin

[Former Member]

Hi Jill,

I have the same scenario and need to configure sso between sap portal & share point.

Can you please help by providing the direction to achieve the sso.

Appreciate your time.

Regards

Sahil