Configure Active Directory membership provider

Use Active Directory for authorization and authentication with Optimizely Content Management System (CMS). The .NET Framework has an Active Directory membership provider, which you use with the CMS Active Directory role provider.

The web server with CMS does not have to be a member of the Active Directory domain. It uses a configured service account to communicate with the Active Directory domain controller.

To configure your site, add the following in the <membership><providers> section of web.config:

Modify connectionUsername and connectionPassword and insert values for a user account with appropriate privileges. See the ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider class for security issues.

Any authenticated user account has the necessary permissions (the Authenticated Users group in its default configuration gives the appropriate permissions). Suppose you reconfigured your Active Directory and changed the default permissions. In that case, you must make sure that the account has the following permissions for groups and users that are part of the subtree that the connection string refers to:

You also should add a connection string to the <connectionStrings> section that defines how the membership provider connects to the Active Directory.

An example:

See the ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider class for the connection string and configuration parameters.

If you create a user in an Active Directory domain, you will have two different user names:

In the default configuration of the Membership provider shown above, the membership provider authenticates with User Principal Names. If you want to authenticate with the Windows Logon Name instead, add the attribute attributeMapUsername="sAMAccountName" to the provider configuration.

Suppose you need to troubleshoot the LDAP connection with a network monitor. In that case, you might want to enable insecure communication with the Active Directory server so that you can see clear text in the communication. Enable insecure communication by adding the attribute connectionProtection="None".

To configure your site, add the following to the <roleManager><providers> section of web.config:

The required attributes shown above are identical to those for the Active Directory membership provider. In most cases, you can and should use the same AD account and connection string for the membership and role providers.

Modify the DOMAIN\ADServiceAccount and password and insert values for a user account with appropriate privileges.

The role names used by default are the Windows domain-compatible names (shown below as pre-Windows 2000 group names). You can use the attribute attributeMapUsername to choose another attribute for the role name if you want to. Some possibilities are CN (which is the Group name as shown below) or "distinguishedName" (which are the fully qualified names such as CN=EPiServerUsers,DC=domain,DC=mycompany,DC=local). The default value is "sAMAccountName".

The default user name mapping is the user principal name to be compatible with the Active Directory membership provider (in the form [email protected]). To change it into the standard Windows user name, add the attribute attributeMapUsername="sAMAccountName".

For troubleshooting purposes, use the connectionProtection attribute. Set connectionProtection="None" for clear-text authentication and communication.

The role provider aggressively caches the Active Directory data. You can control the cache expiration with the attribute cacheTimeout. For example, setting cacheTimeout="1:30:0" sets the timeout to 1 hour 30 minutes. The default is 10 minutes.