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Configuring Windows authentication (Active Directory) |
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Configuring Windows authentication (Active Directory) |
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Kentico CMS supports Windows integrated authentication. It means that when a user signs in to a Windows domain, Kentico CMS automatically recognizes her identity without requiring a user name and password.
Moreover, Kentico CMS is able to automatically import the authenticated users from domain (Active Directory) into the user database, including their roles.
Configuration
| 1. | Before you configure the application for Windows authentication, you need to create a user account that will be the same as your current domain name and assign this user account with administrator permissions. This will allow you to access all features as an administrator once you sign in using Windows authentication. |
| 2. | Sign in as an Administrator to the Site Manager and go to Administration -> Users. Create a new user with following values: - User name: your domain user name in format domain-username, example: office-johns - Full name: your full name |
When importing users and roles, forbidden characters in them are replaced by the character defined in Site Manager -> Settings -> URLs -> Forbidden characters replacement.
Dash "-" is the default value and therefore it is used in this example (domain-username instead of domain\username). If you are using a different character, please change the entered user name accordingly.
You can override this setting by using the following keys in the AppSettings section of your web.config file. In both cases, the value must be exactly one character which will be used as the replacement character:
If you want to achieve the same functionality as in older versions of Kentico CMS (office\username), forbidden characters replacement can be turned off completely using the following two keys. This may cause problems when using wildcard URLs with user names in the wildcard part and is therefore not recommended.
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| 3. | Click OK. On the General tab, set the following values: |
- Is global administrator: yes
- Is external user: yes
- Is domain user: yes
Click OK.
| 4. | Now you can switch the application to the Windows authentication mode. Edit the web.config file of the web project and change the following line: |
<authentication mode="Forms"> |
to:
<authentication mode="Windows"> |
When using the Windows authentication, you also need to have the following settings in your web.config file so that the authentication is required for the live site:
<location path=""> <system.web> <authorization> <deny users="?"/> </authorization> </system.web> </location> |
| 5. | Save the modified web.config file. Close all browsers with Kentico CMS and open the web site in a new browser. Try to go to <web project>\cmssitemanager to make sure you are recognized as a global administrator. |
With this configuration, when an authenticated user comes to the site, her user account is created in Kentico CMS database automatically and her domain groups are imported as roles into Kentico CMS database. It means that the users and roles are not imported on some regular basis, but they are imported when the user comes to Kentico CMS web site.
If you are experiencing the 401 error on Windows 7 or Windows Server 2007, learn the solution to the problem here.
Page url: http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/index.html?configuring_windows_authentication.htm
