It's my pleasure to announce a new product in the pipeline to be released later this year, based on existing customer feedback on what they'd like to see added to the InstantASP product linedup; The InstantASP Active Directory module. This module introduces out of the box integration to active directory security, allowing you to allow authenticate users based on your existing Microsoft Infrastructure.

The module allows the pairing of an existing forms authentication based user account (the standard user account type up until now), to an existing active directory account within your domain. Once configured, these paired users are then able to authenticate to to the application using their active directory credentials.

This can be performed via a username/password input, or the system can at the administrators discretion attempt to authenticate them against their current windows authentication credentials, and if the user is already authenticated to the domain, log the user into the application seamlessly with no user-input neccesary.

In scenario's where the admin feels the user base is too large to pair himself, individual users can once the application is correctly configure, pair their own user accounts to the Active Directory domain by taking a simple authentication step.

With the addition of "required groups", the administrator can specify an active directory user group, which a user must be a member of in order to authenticate to the application. We've worked tirelessly to make this addon as flexible and configurable as possible, to allow for as many different security/authentication scenario's as possible within the scope of the development.

Features include:

•  + Optional LDAP login via form input.
   + Automatic windows authentication login.
   + Required group membership.
   + User level active directory authentication requirement/exclusion to control who can authenticate from where.
   + Anonymous LDAP authentication.
   + Cached LDAP authentication to prevent neccessity for repeat authentication to the domain.
   + Selectable/Easy account pairing via AJAX Account selector for administrators to expedite account pairing.

The addon will initially only be available for InstantKB from version 2.0.4 forwards, although the module is designed to be compatible with the forum at a later date, once the forum is migrated to the newer InstantASP 2.0 Common Framework.

All of this we hope, should be very simple to download, install and configure 'Out of the box' so to speak, which we hope will save our customers time and money performing costly active directory integrations for our applications, we hope to make the product available for pre-order, which will entitle users to access to a closed BETA period, due to the nature of the product there will be no open BETA or release candidate period. More details on this will follow at a time closer to the release.


Kindest Regards,

James Trott
Developer