Hey everyone,

Im currently designing a website for my old school, and its my first paid project. But I believe that I have hit my first obstacle: Authenticating Users.
The school network, has just upgraded from Novell, to Windows 2003 Server. There are just over 1000 profiles (usernames and Passwords etc)

The school have requested that for the Website, that there should be a private intranet for the pupils to access one large directory, and to access the directory they must provide their current username and password from the Windows 2003 Server, Active Directory I believe?

The problem is, is that the Schools website is hosted with a 3rd Party company, and not by the school themselves, and obviously, the Windows 2003 Server is located at the school.

I wondered if there was any way, of making a live connection, for authentification to the schools 2003 server? and if successful create a session cookie to access the private area? Perhaps to collect the information on intervals of every 5 hours, and dump all of the user id's into a MySQL database?

Im really not sure if this is possible? I just wondered if anyone has been having the same issue, or if any one knows a solution to this problem.

I will be willing to send the resolver, a £50 cheque for any fixes to this issue.

Regards

Jamie

P.S. Something else they have requested, is that after this has been accomplished, the the students should then be able to accecss their own indidual profiles, from the 2003 Server? via the 3rd Party web server?

Thanks

Ouch. Not sure how you would do this to be honest but a suggestion that might work.....

Set up a web service on the Windows 2003 server that authenicates users.

Call the web service from your web app (that resides on the 3rd party hosting companies server).

If authenication passes then you can grant them access.

You could do the same sort of thing with the profile information.

Or perhaps it may be more feasible to set up your own users table in a database with usernames and passwords.

Classic ASP Design Tips - Login Page
http://www.bullschmidt.com/devtip-loginpage.asp

The only problem with that is it doesn't fit to the requirement of using there current details (I assume when they change their lan password that want it to change in the app as well).

You could try and set up some sort of data push to the web application I guess.... but you would have a delay with updates and the like...

That is a tough one, I've built websites that do what you need but they have never been in different networks. If you need help with the coding of the pages I could be of plenty of use however.

Hello there,

I may have an alternative solution for you. I am not exactly sure if this is the route you want to take. However, consider Caspio Bridge it is an online bases software to create webforms and database applications without programming. Caspio Bridge has feature such as unlimited user authentication, recorld level security, file uploads and downloads and much more and again you can create these without having to programm. With Caspio Bridge you can easily import or export data in CSV or MS Access.

Please check it out: www.caspio.com

If you have any questions regarding Caspio Bridge, feel free to send me an email at: edward.garcia@caspio.com