Reporting on link usage within federated portal environment

Question

Hi,
We have a fedrated portal environment and woul like to be able to report on how many users click on a web link within one of the portal pages.  Is there an easy way to gather this information across all of the portal systems?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I agree with Oliver on how easy it is to misunderstand SSO. People unfamiliar with the technology often assume that all varieties of SSO (e.g., logon tickets, x.509 certificates) are all sufficiently "secure".
It seems like people talk a lot more about logon tickets in the SNC. That's fine and all (because it's free), but people might be overlooking the security problem with logon tickets; they share the same security problems with web browser cookies (because a login ticket is essentially a cookie).
Additionally, there's the issue of insecure communications. If you use certificates to authenticate, then you can take advantage of SAP's "Secure Network Communications" technology. It's something like SSL but for the RFC/DIAG protocol.
One word of caution though: SAP only provides SNC from server-to-server with the SAP Cryptographic Library for free. For client-to-server encrypted communications, you probably have to find a vendor in the SAP EcoHub. You can query something along the lines of "single sign-on". Just find a vendor that uses certificate-based SSO. Most of the time they can deal with whichever identity repository that your company uses (e.g., ADS, eDirectory, RSA, SQL).
Summary:
1) There are different forms of SSO with different levels of "security"
2) Pay some attention to encrypted communications (you can address two important problems with the "right" SSO technology
3) You can do a lot with free SAP tools (e.g., cryptolib, logon tickets), but be willing to accept the security tradeoffs
Edited by: Ha Le on Nov 10, 2010 8:26 AM