Site Minder People Picker should work like windows authentication results

Question

I have a custom STS(Site Minder) and windows authentication configured for sharepoint web application. In the people picker for Windows authentication, I can search by first name, last name, email id. But when I login using the Site Minder, I cannot see search results with first name, last name or email. How do i take care of this in Site Minder, so that i get results for fname, lname and email?

Answer 1

What is this article about

https://support.ca.com/cadocs/0/CA%20SiteMinder%20Agent%20for%20SharePoint%202010%2012%205%201-ENU/Bookshelf_Files/HTML/idocs/index.htm?toc.htm?1827615.html

Isn't this telling that People Picker should work oob without any other customization?

Answer 2

There is no default way to search for users when using SAML authentication like with SiteMinder federation as SharePoint has no way to know what kind of directory you are using let alone performing lookups in it.

The solution is to build a custom claims provider that plugs into SharePoint to provide additional services: claims augmentation and claims lookup.

Claims augmentation provides a way for you to add additional claims to the list of claims provided by SiteMinder (typically only the identity claim).

Claims lookup functionality can be developed by specifying the specific search connections & lookup logic needed to connect to your backend directory (typically LDAP) and to list search results in the people picker.

This article gives a good overview on how to build one:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff699494.aspx

CA also sells a component that does this for you:

http://www.ca.com/us/collateral/product-briefs/na/CA-SiteMinder-Agent-for-SharePoint.aspx

Additionally, there is a good whitepaper on how to setup the federation itself:

http://interopvendoralliance.org/labs/siteminder-federation-to-sharepoint-2010.aspx