Authenticate Sharepoint with Active Directory?

Question

Just need to use find a simple way to have AD authenticate as the login for a Sharepoint site. This fairly quick and simple to get going ?

Thanks!

Answer 1

For SharePoint 2007, see this article. You probably want to set it up to do Windows integrated authentication with NTLM. Getting authentication working is probably not too hard, getting your site setup the way you want with permissions/authorization working probably isn't. Depends on how complex your site is. I wasn't directly involved but I know that it took a few months to get our intranet up and bug free.

One recommendation that I would have is to use AD groups or SharePoint groups that contain AD groups rather than individuals to control access. It's much easier to clean up AD group membership when an individual leaves than to track down all the places where you've given them individual access (including membership in SharePoint groups).

Answer 2

You need your server to be part of the domain before installing SharePoint.

If you do that, the default configuration will be AD authentication.

Answer 3

Do the users need to be added to a group at all? It seems I can get in but I have admin rights on the domain. The sharepoint server is running on a backup domain controller machine.

Thanks in advance

Answer 4

Here is a decent discussion of SharePoint security links

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/06/29/sharepoint-groups-permissions-site-security-and-depreciated-site-groups.aspx

Essentially, you will either need to add users to the appropriate SharePoint group. The defaults for a site are generally xxx_Visitor, xxx_Members and xxx_Owners, with each group having increasing security rights.

You can either add an AD domain to these groups or else add individual AD users