All-In-One Identity Management and Cloud Security

The SharePoint 2013 People Picker is the tool you use to find and select users, groups and claims to grant someone a permission to a site in SharePoint.  The SharePoint 2013 People Picker is heavily dependent on how authentication is configured for your site so you need to ensure your SAML or claim provider is intelligent.

All claim providers created equally!

Today the most common issue SharePoint administrators find with an authentication claim provider is that any name you type in the People Picker, SharePoint will accept.  Even worse, with a typical claims provider you can type nonsense and you will see two results, neither of them valid!

Credit:Kirk Evans Microsoft Blog

This is not because the SharePoint People Picker needs to be fixed, it's working as designed, it is a result of the claim provider.

The EmpowerID SharePoint Manager solves this problem, we have created the most intelligent claim provider in the market today.  In doing so we set out to do 4 things which will have a huge impact on the day to day operations of your SharePoint site.

1. Create the most intelligent claim provider in the world.  We didn't stop at providing intelligent responses to the query, we also segregate the data so that delegated administrators can only view results for data that they can see.  This is a very important point, if a business partner administrator wants to grant someone rights to a site the EmpowerID data filtering and masking is still maintained.

2. Provide SharePoint "web parts".  This is technology that allows users to find new sites and request access to it.  It also allows site administrators to approve site access, all directly within SharePoint.
3. Fully support federated or claims based authentication into SharePoint.  Users can authenticate with EmpowerID, bring their own social identity or use another.

4. Answer the "Why" question.  Why does someone have access and when was it granted?  The other side a SharePoint claim provider is tracking these finer details.  EmpowerID includes full certification and attestation for SharePoint access, this provides your enterprise with a host of risk controls not previously available.

Want to know more?

Watch a previously recorded webinar that discusses these points here

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Organizations that manage successful brands know what their customers want from a website experience and are able to provide it.

Consumers want simpler processes.  

They want a quick, seamless authentication experience. 

They want to get to a site from any device that is handy at the time, whether it’s a pc, a tablet or a smartphone.

They have lots of choices and they are bombarded with lots of information. Your branding must be visible and the flow of your customer through your site must be smooth so they will have a positive experience, remember you and want to return.

And your security for their identity needs to protect them and you without being obtrusive.

Your prize, if you capture consumers with a well-designed web presence, is a solid foundation for  business growth, faster fulfilment of your clients’ needs, and substantially greater efficiencies that can  reduce costs and drive profitability.

And of course you are supposed to accommodate all that and keep to a modest IT budget… phew!  

Here’s what it’s going to take:

• A highly scalable Single Sign On (SSO) and Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform – one that can take you where your ambition wants to go.  Your IAM infrastructure may need to manage millions of users and tens of thousands of logins an hour.
• Flexible branding – the login process can’t be generic, it and related Single Sign On (SSO) pages need to be customizable to your themes.
• Support for social media logins is a must if you want to simplify the user experience and entice the widest number of users possible.
• Self-service password reset and challenge questions that allows consumers to quickly get back in to your site if they forget their username or their password.
• 2^nd factor authentication capabilities and even identity validation will be needed if you need to provide an extra level of protection for your data or resources.  You may want the ability to step up authorization when a user needs to access more sensitive information.
• A flexible API is another core need – on that can be embedded into your existing applications to connect to common authentication, provisioning and authorization processes.
• You will want a licensing model that scales from a modest user base to one that is still affordable if you exceed your best expectations.
• And while many SSO platforms claim that you can easily entrust provisioning to another platform that they can connect to, that’s going to cost you more money to develop, to implement and to support. So you will want a platform that is capable of integrating all of your essential identity management tasks from the start.
• There is a lot of other technical stuff that you are going to want, like compatibility with all the major standards (SAML, WS-Fed, OAuth), password vaulting and reverse proxy for those legacy apps that can’t make a standard federated connection, but that still need to talk to your federated environment (because throwing out everything you own to pave way for new standards isn’t always practical).

There is a solution that provides all of the above: EmpowerID. 

EmpowerID is an integrated and modular platform, built on a single codebase and driven by workflow with prebuilt one-to-many SSO and Identity Management scenarios with the needs of consumers in mind. 

EmpowerID’s visual workflow designer and adaptive HTML5 interfaces offer a vastly improved and simplified approach to traditional SSO and IAM challenges.  It can be stood up in just a few days or weeks depending on the customization desired, instead of the months that other applications take. 

Most importantly, EmpowerID supports a satisfying access experience for consumers and drives strong ROI with its secure, seamless and flexible identity processes.