Wednesday, August 11, 2010

No more passwords for Domino applications

A number of times I have heard customers commenting that they can sign into Windows and access everything that they need to do their job - except for Lotus stuff - where they have to enter their username and password again. This may have been true in the past, but as you can see from this demonstration created by my frolleague Steve Seymour from The Portal Partnership this is no longer the case. A users credentials can be passed from their Windows login to Domino via SPNEGO which will in turn create an LTPA token on the Domino/Websphere infrastructure that will allow access to all those services without having to authenticate again. So in this video you see a user log into Windows and then access a personalised Domino welcome page, iNotes (web mail), Lotus Quickr (team places), Lotus Sametime (real time collaboration), Lotus Connections (professional social networking) and Websphere Portal (Enterprise integration) without having to authenticate. Just to be clear - this is not smoke and mirrors - this is all out of the box functionality. Have a look - it only takes 80 seconds.

If you are wondering how Lotus Notes fits into this, then then you should check out the new Lotus Notes Single Logon capability built into Notes 8.5 which means that once you have logged into Windows you can launch Notes without having to log in again*. Seemless.

So if you hear folks saying that other competing technologies are "more integrated" because they don't need to reauthentiate, show them Steve's video.

*Single logon for roaming users is being evaluated for a future release