Enable SSO APEX 4 and MS Active Directory

Question

Hi,
I want enable SSO on my APEX applications. Actually, we use Microsoft Active Directory and Windows 2003 (tomorrow maybe Windows 2008).
Regarding your experiences, what is the best solution that I can us in order to implement SSO ?
Thanks for your help,
I have forget to give this informations :
- Our Oracle Server is under Linux.
- We use Oracle Database 11GR2.
- Our domain controller is under Windows 2003 (we will probably upgrade to 2008 this year).
- Our APEX version is 4.1.0.00.32.
Edited by: user7224400 on 3 févr. 2012 16:23

Answer 1

Morten -- Interesting. I wish we had found that before we implemented WebLogic and the APEX listener, it may have been an interesting other option to consider. I'm not sure it would have made it past our change control folks as they might bark at the supportability/security, but it is a intriguing option.
Patrick -- (You have a great blog by the way.). We are talking about upgrading our APEX 3.1 instances this year so I am very interested in the new authentication type. Is it doing anything other than simply retrieving the logon_user? i.e., is it actually authenticating against anything or would it just read the logon_user and let them in if they matched a known username?
AJ -- We just converted from Oracle Portal last year. When I had Oracle Portal, I had it setup to use Windows Native Authentication following the supported solution for that and then had APEX set up as a partner application for portal. So if someone hit portal first, they'd automatically logon as their active directory user through WNA and would be dropped into portal. If they then hit a link for APEX in portal, it would (in rapid succession) go to APEX, redirect back to the portal SSO server, see they were authenticated in app server, and drop them into APEX with barely a visible screen flicker. It worked flawlessly UNTIL we started upgrading to Windows 7. Then a number of changes and patches are required to get WNA to work with app server 10g and Windows 7. If you are using portal in your 10g IAS, you may want to consider that route.
Pardon me while I hop on my soapbox briefly -- I think if our friends in Oracle land could come out with a fully supported method of using NTLM or similar technologies to automatically login to APEX applicaitons, it would help considerably in the adoption of APEX and the APEX listener in customers that have Oracle databases and Active Directory which is a pretty decent size market.
Ok, soapbox moment ended. :-)
Rgds/Mark M.