Federated SSO with Salesforce and Google using OpenSSO
Software as a Service(SaaS) has evolved as the service delivery mechanism of choice in the internet age. Managed Services and SaaS provide enterprises options for deployments that deliver levels of service to fit individual needs and offload overworked IT departments. For key, business critical software, though most large companies have still been using the traditional locally stored licensed software, they are keeping a close eye on the SaaS space. Given the current economic scenario and the pressures, SaaS adoption could accelerate in the coming days as a means of limiting maintenance costs and as a way of addressing business priorities.
Salesforce and Google have been leading and early adoptors of SaaS based software delivery mechanism. Salesforce.com offers an alternative to locally run sales force automation (SFA) packages; Google provides productivity applications via Google Apps Premier Edition. Here's an earlier screencast on usage scenario of these SaaS applications with Single Sign-On.
For Single Sign On, both Google Apps and Salesforce have support for the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard, that can be used to provide single sign-on system access to these two SaaS vendors. This lets customers who invested in SAML to implement single sign-on in Salesforce and Google Apps easily and cost-effectively. Also, SAML never sends passwords to Salesforce and Google, so it is inherently more secure than other authentication mechanisms.
These 2 new Sun Developer Network articles(Google Apps article / Salesforce integration article) describe the steps involved in configuring and using OpenSSO for SAML based SSO integrations with Google and Salesforce, in detail.
Certainly take a look at these very interesting articles and give the integrations a try!
