How to Integrate Vanilla Forum as a Relying party in Azure ACS?

sureshkk

We would like to configure Vanilla forum as a relying party in Azure ACS i.e. use ACS as a Federation Provider and make the Vanilla trust ACS. ACS supports WS-Federation, is there a addon in Vanilla which can handle this?

businessdad

Explanation for the "non-.NET speakers": would like to use Azure ACS as the authentication service for Vanilla Forums.

From MSDN website

A relying party application (also known as a claims-aware application or claims-based application) is an application or service that relies on claims for authentication. In Windows Azure Active Directory Access Control (also known as Access Control Service or ACS), a relying party application is a web site, an application, or a service that uses ACS to implement federated authentication.

To answer the original question

As far as I know, there isn't a plugin that implements Azure ACS authentication. While I'm quite sure that it could be developed, I reckon that testing it could be difficult, as it would require a properly configured Azure ACS infrastructure to do any test.

sureshkk

Thanks for your response. Any idea if the commercial version of the Vanilla forum has a plugin for ACS? If not, will Vanilla implement such a plugin for a cost?

R_J

I found that link that describes how to connect to Azure ACS with OAuth: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh674475.aspx

Vanillas twitter and facebook plugins already use OAuth so there is something to look at if someone wants to integrate Azures ACS

businessdad

.> @sureshkk said:

Thanks for your response. Any idea if the commercial version of the Vanilla forum has a plugin for ACS? If not, will Vanilla implement such a plugin for a cost?

I think you will get a faster reply by contacting the support team for the hosted version at vanillaforums.com. They will also be able to give you an estimate of the cost.

I think that anyone could implement such feature, my concern is that most of the time would be taken by putting together the required Azure ACS infrastructure for testing (and it has to be configured properly, or tests would be meaningless).