Is Single Sign On useful?
Friday, 04 September 2009One cool feature that is included in MageBridge is Single Sign On. Many users have asked for it, but few know what it really does. Actually we ourselves have doubts about Single Sign On (SSO) being usefull in practice. Let's give an overview of what SSO is and if it's something for you or not.
Single Sign In and Single Sign On
If you tie two applications (Joomla! and Magento) together, you will have users in both applications. A bridge between the two is only usefull, if an user can login in both applications using the same username and password. This is a concept called Single Sign In (SSI) - you only need to remember one set of user-credentials which applies to both Joomla! as Magento.
But the concept of SSI requires you to login twice, because the two applications are still being separated. If you login to Joomla!, you are not logged into Magento yet. That's why we have Single Sign On. SSO takes SSI to the next level - if you login to Magento you are logged into Joomla! simultaneously, and vice versa.
What about SSO and visual integration?
MageBridge takes a different approach here: Not only can you login in both applications, the content of Magento is also integrated into Joomla!. This opens up for a whole new range of solutions. If properly done, Magento is seamlessly integrated into Joomla! without the visitor (potentially: customer) knowing the difference between the two. In fact, using this scenario the question pops up if Magento as stand-alone website is still needed.
When a visitor needs to navigate between the domain of Joomla! and the domain of Magento, this could add to the confusion. With MageBridge, you can forget about the Magento frontend and use the Joomla! frontend entirely. There are even (simple) techniques to prevent visitors from ever visiting the Magento frontend - which is better for them and better for your SEO rankings.
So is SSO usefull?
So MageBridge offers you to integrate Magento into Joomla! and never use Magento stand-alone anymore. Regarding SSO we then have to differentiate between SSO within MageBridge and SSO within Magento. SSO within MageBridge is a fundamental aspect when using MageBridge: When you login to Joomla!, you will also need to be logged into the visually integrated parts of Magento. We actually do not call this SSO, because it's one of the foundations of the whole integration - we just call it user synchronization.
The other type is SSO within Magento - if you login to Joomla!, you will also be logged into the Magento stand-alone frontend. But SSO within Magento is actually not really needed anymore. If there is no reason why the visitor should ever need to visit the Magento stand-alone frontend, why bother with implementing SSO? This is the reason why SSO is turned off by default in MageBridge.
However SSO for the Magento backend could still be very usefull. We see integrating the Magento Control Panel into the Joomla! Administrator as a pointless task, but SSO enables you to login to both backends simultaneously which makes jumping between the two applications easier. It's for sure one good reason to turn on SSO anyway.