Multi-Authentication Providers

Microsoft Azure Active Directory is now Microsoft Entra ID

Multi-Auth is the ability for users to authenticate to a single SmartForms site using different authentication methods.

In most Microsoft-centric organizations Windows Authentication is used as the default authentication provider because it works seamlessly with Active Directory and does not require users to enter login details when accessing the site. The credentials used to log in to Windows are able to be passed to the site through Internet Explorer.

In some organizations Active Directory is not used so a different security provider is registered with the product which points to a different service for authenticating users. In this case the users will need to provide a username and password to log in to the SmartForms site.

It is becoming increasingly common, however, for organizations to require a mixture of authentication schemes. It might be a scenario where Vendors or Partner organizations need access to internal resources or a scenario where a merger has brought in users from a different directory service. Whatever the case may be these organizations require an easy way to allow all their users access to the same resources.

Multi-Auth in the product has added the ability for the user accessing the site to indicate how they would like to authenticate. The site then knows how to properly switch between authentication schemes depending upon the user’s selection.

One side effect to Multi-Auth is that Integrated Windows Authentication users, who are not used to any kind of intermediate step between clicking a link and seeing a form, will now occasionally need to select their authentication mode. Authentication is cached by the browser so they will not need to make their choice each time, but if the credentials are removed from the cache they will need to make the selection again.

When Windows STS authentication or Forms STS authentication is enabled, it is important to frequently save work that has been done in the Designer as work might be lost when the same session is left open for 8 hours or longer.