Before you can use a digital product or service you will need to sign in. By doing so, the digital service knows who you are and based on that grants you access to the functionality and data you are entitled to access. Digital products that are based on the Smart Society platform, will not handle the sign in themselves, but will forward the user to the Smart Society platform.
Username, password and Multi Factor Authentication
The default authentication scheme of the Smart Society platform is based on username, password and Multi Factor Authentication. An organization will need to assign the user management role to one (or more) of their staff and this person can add users to the Smart Society platform.
This is an easy to use solution to quickly start using a digital product linked to the Smart Society platform, but this approach has some downsides as well:
- You will need to keep track on who joins or leaves the organization and based on that add or remove the user from the Smart Society platform.
- When your organization uses products from different vendors, having usernames and passwords for users in each individual product may become a management nightmare.
- In such a scenario, the user will have multiple user accounts (one for each product/vendor) and therefore multiple passwords as well, which may lead to security risks and a poor user experience.
Identity Federation
Identity Federation can be used to mitigate these downsides. When using Identity Federation, you will link your existing user accounts to the Smart Society platform.
With Identity Federation, there is only one user account per user that will need to be managed and there is only one user account that the user needs to know in order to access products (of multiple vendors if applicable).
Your organization controls settings like password length and expiry and your organization defines whether to use multi factor authentication.
Setting up Identity Federation, requires configuring a trust relationship between your identity provider/technology platform and the Smart Society platform. We will assist your IT department to configure the required settings.
Supported federation options
The Smart Society platform currently supports the following identity providers/technology platforms:
- Microsoft Azure AD (using Open ID Connect or SAML)
For more information on how to Setup Federation using Azure Active Directory click here - Active Directory Federation Services (using WS-Federation or SAML)
For more information on how to Setup Federation using ADFS click here - Google Workspace (using OAuth 2.0)
For more information on how to Setup Federation using Google Workspace click here
Please contact us when you would like to configure a federation with another identity provider/technology platform.