Sharepoint: authenticating users via forms authentication

Question

My problem is the following(sharepoint Newbie) , i want to change the default zone from being a Windows Authenticated Zone to a Forms Authenticated Zone ,thereby forcing the site collection administrator to log in via forms authentication and not windows also the sharepoint users will be accesing the site internally my goal is to effectively replace windows authentication with forms authentication as my company does not have active directory installed.

So far i have created an ASP Application that adds the users to the database,the database was created via the .Net Framework Asp tool(Asp reg_sql),however when i change the default zone to the AspNetSqlMembershipProvider(Forms) and attempt to add my site collection administrator via the Central admistrator, i get the following error "No Exact Match found" as shown on the screenshot. My inkling is that somehow the people picker is failing to read the users from the database but reasearch on correcting that thus far has proved fruitless. I have made all the relevant changes on the these sites(Central admin site,My test site & Add Users site) config files.Changes are the following(Membeship Provider,Connection String,People Picker) i left out the role provider for now as it is optional.

Help on this would ge highly appreciated...

Answer 1

I've had a similar problem in the past. It seems that the People Picker is tuned for Active Directory, but sometimes needs help finding the FBA users.

In the People Picker, try putting the provider name in front of the username as if it were a domain. The format would look like the following: provider\username.