The value of single sign on support for your intranet

I had an interesting meeting with the MD of a potential new retail client last week who had allowed the IT systems used in his rapidly expanding company to gradually grow over time. This had just happened naturally, as he purchased systems to meet the separate functional needs of various parts of the business.

He is opening new premises regularly, and the business plan calls for this to continue and even accelerate.

Apart from the obvious need to try to make available accurate version controlled information and news to each new business unit, he shared with me that one of his main requirements for the intranet was simply to allow a single portal to provide access to the other systems.

He had done an internal audit, and his managers now require 17 separate log ins and passwords to access all the systems they need to do their job.

I realized that although all of our clients do use the Claromentis permission system and extensive single sign on support to provide gateway access to other web based applications, I had actually not really thought through how valuable this gateway approach is. Having discussed this with him we added a series of simple slides featuring ‘Puzzled Pete’ – the business owner of a small, growing company without dedicated IT support who feels that life had got to be easier than this!

It is one of those great features that is really easy to understand and also to provide – requiring a simple once only set up effort in the Claromentis config files and then allowing single sign on systems like Active Directory, Novell e-Directory, or others to just do what they are supposed to do – provide a single access credential for each user, and making it easy to keep up with new hires and staff exiting the business.