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Relationships of Trust: Novell Access Manager: Simplifying Multi-Community Access to SharePoint
By Ken Baker
Novell Connection Magazine - April 2010

Here's an excerpt:

In 2006 Novell and Microsoft announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration initiatives to build, market and support a series of offerings that would make Novell and Microsoft products work better together (Visit www.moreinterop.com). While many of these efforts have focused on interoperability and manageability between Windows and Linux, a recent joint project has simplified administration and security of customers’ SharePoint implementations by using Novell Access Manager to provide multi-community access to SharePoint services.

If you use SharePoint for collaboration and data sharing, you might have encountered difficulties managing access from your various identity stores. While SharePoint supports standard LDAP identity stores, using anything other than Active Directory (AD) for access to SharePoint can create administrative complexity. Even if you’re just using AD, management can be difficult when you have multiple AD identity stores. The identity and access management becomes even more complex if you want to give your partners and customers access to your SharePoint resources, as these communities are often managed in separate identity stores.

To deal with the need to provide SharePoint access to different user communities—inside and outside of your organization—organizations typically have to either supplement their existing identity infrastructures with additional provisioning products to synchronize their different identity stores, or they have to employ manual registration and management processes. In either case, the result is increased complexity and management overhead. But all the complexity and administrative overhead caused by the need for multi-community access to SharePoint can virtually disappear by introducing Novell Access Manager into the mix.

Novell Access Manager can be used as an authentication server for Microsoft SharePoint to help administrators overcome the challenges of managing multi-community access to SharePoint.

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It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.