Public Sharepoint site with custom user registration

Question

We are doing a public site with external user registration based on Sharepoint 2010. We have some experience in ASP.NET development but nobody has any experience with Sharepoint. What is a relatively simple thing to do in ASP.NET, after doing some research in the web we found that it is not so straight forward in Sharepoint. So we would appreciate some advice for the right approach.

First of all, we have to do a custom registration form with all the information we need, including file uploads, have a SQL Server Database table to store all data, and use FBA (or another method) in Sharepoint to authenticate against it.

Then we need an administrator (AD user) to validate registration and automatically generate a password that will be send to the user. The user can only login after this validation.

Last, we must implement a two way login, a classic username/password and the other method is against an Identity Provider in another website (need to redirect) with a SAML request, after the response we have to compare and validate the response with the user data in Database.

Is all of this doable with Sharepoint? What is the best approach? How difficult can this be for a begginner Sharepoint developer?

Thanks in advance. Nuno

Answer 1

Neno,

It seems quite a difficult task for a beginner to work on SharePoint Anonymous site...

Normally as you know SharePoint websites are authenticated with your Active Directory users but you can implement different authentication methods, one is Forms Based Authentication for which you can use ASP.NET Membership Provider as we usually use in ASP.NET applications...

For FBA [Form Based Authentication with ASP.NET Membership], there are very nice codeplex projects:

http://sharepoint2010fba.codeplex.com/

http://sp2010fba.codeplex.com/

Use the one which is suitable to you... The second thing you have asked for is Authentication via some other website, SharePoint can use Windows Live ID/Hotmail for authentication but I really don't know which website you are talking about, can you please mention the name of the website?

However there can be a possibility of making your custom Login page for SharePoint which these codeplex solutions also do! In that you are free to write code and can authenticate via writing code behind...

I hope this helps!