Drupal and SiteMinder Enterprise Integration for Bundesrechenzentrum Austria

A few days ago MontenaSoft has successfully completed the integration of SiteMinder and Drupal for BRZ - Austrian Federal Computing Centre (Bundesrechenzentrum Österreich GmbH).

The Federal Computing Center Ltd. is the leading IT service provider of the Austrian federal administration. Its clients include, among others, numerous Austrian government agencies that require complex web applications for their daily work. The management of security policies for those applications is performed through SiteMinder.

eTrust^TM SiteMinder® from Computer Associates is a security management product for Web applications with a centralized security infrastructure for managing user authentication and user access.

SiteMinder includes, among many other features:

• Single Sign (Single Sign-On) for multiple heterogeneous applications, platforms and Internet domains,
• Centralized management of access information on a policy-based servers
• Heterogeneous platform support for authentication systems, operating systems, user profiles, web server, etc.

The process of integrating SiteMinder and Drupal was for us very much a proof of concept that demonstrates all advantages of the robust, modular open source systems like the Drupal is. Integration is mainly done with the help of the SiteMinder module (developed by DevelopmentSeed for the World Bank). In simple words, this module performs the mapping of an SiteMinder user account to an Drupal user account. Thus, any change of SiteMinder settings for a specific user account will be immediately incorporated into the Drupal, and be available to all Drupal applications on the web server.

This pilot project has impressively demonstrated the applicability of Drupal in an enterprise environment. Colleagues from Federal Computing Centre were very satisfied with results and speed of the of the system integration, and the project progressed in smooth and predictable manner.

In coming months, MontenaSoft will most likely perform further integration of Federal Computing Centre portal and Drupal systems developed by our company. These will probably include the adaptation of the Drupal role system to the security policy of Federal Computing Centre, since was one of the missing points in Drupal’s community SiteMinder module. We will continue to report about this exciting challenge in the enterprise arena through our News.