One of the biggest arguments you’ll get in deploying open source software in a corporate environment perception that they are extra, standalone applications. If your corporation uses an LDAP server, you can get some big wins by ensuring that your open source applications can authenticate with your corporate LDAP store, showing integration with the main systems.
I recently went through this exercise with a number of applications in our environment, including:
- Subversion
- MediaWiki
- WordPress
I thought I’d throw up an entry here outlining the tools I used to make this integration possible.
Subversion was a no-brainer, since we host our repositories using mod_dav_svn. Configuring the mod_auth_ldap module in the Apache server and converting all access to SSL made this integration painless, once I figured out how to build Apache to use OpenLDAP and Secure LDAP. For MediaWiki, the Mediawiki LDAP Extension worked flawlessly. The key problem with Mediawiki is that there is no mechanism built in to ensure that logins are performed via SSL. A quick rewrite rule in the Apache server took care of this for me. A complete explanation of this process can be found at Library Web Chic.
For WordPress, I found a great plugin from Kane IT Consulting that was extremely easy to configure. I had the plugin installed and configured in minutes. I highly recommend this one. The Admin-SSL plugin, gave us the security around the login that we needed.
What has been interesting to me is seeing the subtle shift in perception of these applications as we integrated them into the authentication system. They almost seem like legitimate pieces of the system now … even to me.
Bieber Labs 
Well done Ron. It must feel good to have demonstrated that “shareware” is real software. Congratulations.
Hi,
I’m doing exactly the same at my workplace : we set up wordpress blogs, mediawiki and alfresco instances.
All three can be set as opensearch sources so you can add them as search engines in Firefox 2 and IE 7.
next steps :
a) trying to set up alfresco as an opensearch portal so one can search through the blogs, wiki and documents stored in alfresco from a sible point.
b) SSO integration would be a winner. I found out a Shibboleth extension for mediawiki, but I’m still stucked on wordpress and mediawiki
An outstanding share! I have just forwarded this onto a
coworker who has been conducting a little research on this.
And he in fact ordered me breakfast simply because I stumbled
upon it for him… lol. So allow me to reword this….
Thank YOU for the meal!! But yeah, thanx for spending some time to
talk about this matter here on your internet site.