SSO authentication

Integrating Salesforce to the Sierra Club Intranet for 600,000 users

Project Background

Sierra Club wanted to enable Single Sign-Off (SSO) to allow its employees and members (over 600,000 individuals) to effortlessly access their intranet (built and maintained by Invotra) by logging in to their Salesforce accounts.

An ambitious yet seamless SSO integration

Partnering with Invotra, Invdev’s development team integrated with Sierra Club’s instance of Salesforce to enable their Drupal intranet instance to authenticate against existing Salesforce credentials.

To make things more challenging Sierra Group specified that:

The user roles people held on Salesforce had to control the access/permissions they would have on their intranet.
Additional intranet functionality would need to be developed to accommodate controlled intranet access to Sierra Club’s external members, supporters and volunteers.
Provide users with access to the platform from any location via mobile devices.

3 results of the project

Our approach to SSO authentication

The Invdev development team utilised the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) protocol to implement the Single Sign-On (SSO) between Sierra Club’s Salesforce and intranet instances.

Salesforce is used as an Identity Provider (IDP), while the intranet is configured as the Service Provider (SP) which means the intranet becomes a connected application within Salesforce for Sierra Club’s users.

Configuring the connection this way means a Sierra Club user can log into their intranet account in one of two ways:

When logging into a user’s Salesforce account, the intranet appears as a configured connected application.
Users can access the intranet directly which will redirect the user to a Salesforce login page and then redirect them back to the intranet, fully authenticated. If they are already logged into Salesforce, their existing session will be recognised and they will immediately be redirected to a logged-in intranet session.

"Sierra Club made it clear that Single Sign-On (SSO) across all their systems was essential for all their different users. Our approach to create a seamless user experience through SSO, now means Sierra Club's user can now self-serve and access a wide range of tools with one set of credentials."

Paul Zimmerman

Invdev COO

Meet the rest of the intranet project team

Invotra

Invotra is a leading SaaS provider of enterprise intranet and portal solutions. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people around the globe rely upon our secure software services. Invotra provides you with an enterprise-ready intranet that will give you both control and flexibility in a highly secure and accessible way.

Sierra Club

Founded by Scottish-American conservationist John Muir in 1892, Sierra Club is an environmental organisation, with over 3 million active supporters and 600,000 members, that is committed to helping people explore, preserve and protect the planet.

Let's talk about Single Sign On (SSO)

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