Welcome to this session on External Authentication Providers. In this session
we'll see how out systems authenticate citee users and how we can change the
authentication provider there are a number of steps that will help us do
that from mapping users from the external system to changing the
authentication plug-in and then configuring that authentication plug-in
and then we'll need to test and propagate the configuration to all of
the different environments and finally we'll talk about customizing your own
authentication plug-in so let's go ahead and get started
so how does out systems authenticate IT users when an IT user tries to access
the infrastructure out systems checks the authentication method that is
configured if it's using the default built-in authentication out systems will
validate things locally and then create the credentials needed for the user if
an external authentication provider is configured out systems delegates this to
the external authentication plugin the plug-in is responsible for validating
the credentials externally and then returns a unique user ID which will be
mapped to an out systems user ID so how would we change the authentication
provider to do this we would first need to map the users from the external
system into out systems so an out systems user exists for them
then we need to choose the new authentication method we could then
configure that authentication provider in the lifetime environment and then
begin testing the configuration settings if the configuration settings work then
we want to propagate those settings to all of the other environments once
they're in all of the other environments we should test in each of the different
environments and then finally apply the changes so let's look at some more
details and see this in a step-by-step fashion so to start with mapping users
from the external system means that we need the IT users that
need access to life time to have a corresponding user in lifetime so
mapping users from an external authentication provider can be performed
manually or automatically the users can just be created manually in lifetime or
we can attempt to automate this process by using the lifetime services API for
more information about that API check out the success documentation
below we could also go in and change the authentication plug-in out of the box
out systems provides an Active Directory and an LDAP authentication provider so
to choose one of these we just have to select them from the list and begin to
configure that authentication provider and here you can see we need to select
that we're using an external authentication provider for this to
actually become active by default we have the out systems built-in
authentication selected so to configure the authentication plug-in is relatively
simple for each of the different types like the Active Directory authentication
there are some information that needs to be provided and then we can click Save
configuration once we set the configuration we would then want to test
it by seeing if a user can login with that particular configuration so here we
can see we would have asked for an external authentication provider
selected the Active Directory choice at this point we would have configured it
and we should have tested it so once we had had tested it and the user could
login the next step would be to propagate this to all the different
environments so here you can actually see a summary of the steps and what's
happened so far so we started configuring the external authentication
we then tested the plug-in in the lifetime environment and it returned
that that test succeeded we would now propagate this from the lifetime
environment to the other environments like development qua
and production so to propagate the configuration once testing is done we
ask the propagation to occur and then we'll need to go to those environments
and test if it actually works before we want to apply it in those different
environments so here you can see we can propagate it to all of the different
environments and it will show us that yes this has been propagated to
development and this has propagated to production and in this particular
infrastructure those are the only two environments that we have so these are
all the different steps that it takes and at this point we can apply the
configuration and everything will be okay so that helps us with choosing and
setting up one of the existing authentication providers in the out
systems Forge there are other authentication provider plugins
available which have been created by members of our community since these
authentication plugins are related to security and could compromise your
security we recommend that you test and validate all of them before using them
there's also reference documentation so you can learn how to implement your own
custom authentication provider plug-in so this would allow you to specifically
meet whatever needs you might have and again in the success area there is
documentation on how to implement an authentication plug-in so that's it for
the external authentication providers session thanks for watching and have a
great day