Single Sign-On and External Applications Portlet

Question

I would like to know how complicated would be to call an External Application with SSO (like Hotmail), outside the External Applications Portlet.
We have defined around 10 external applications with SSO,they worked fine.
but due to look&feel issues, we would like to put them in a content area , like items that when the user clicks, takes them to the external application and performs the single sign-on.
Any advice will be appreciated.
tks!!

Answer 1

Maria, I was experimenting with this last night, to answer your question, and I think a cool way of doing this would be the following:
Create a custom attribute called "App ID" - make this a NUMBER type. This is where the external application id will be stored.
Create a custom item type: "External Application"
You have two options for the base type: either "URL" or "<None>". If you pick URL, then you can have the item contain the URL for fapp_process_login, but this is not advisable because it will require the administrator to type in this long URL every time a new application is added.
If you select base type URL, you should use that URL to let the administrator provide a URL to the application's homepage, or a help page or something of that sort.
Edit the newly created item to set the Attribute and Procedure properties.
Add the "App ID" attribute - no default.
On the Procedure tab, add the following procedures (called as HTTP), each with the App ID passed as "p_app_id":
Login http://server.domain.com/pls/portal30_sso/portal30_sso.wwsso_app_admin.fapp_process_login
Edit http://server.domain.com/pls/portal30_sso/portal30_sso.wwsso_app_admin.edit_fappuser
That's it!
Add the new custom item type to a folder, and all the administrator needs to do is set the title, and App ID for the new item.
Excercise for the Reader
You will notice that clicking on the Edit link will take you to the login server when you are done editing the credentials. To avoid this, pass another parameter to the edit procedure - p_done_url, and set a value for that to point to the page that you want to go to after editing credentials.