User Authentication in Salesforce

Authenticating to Salesforce can be done in different ways. In many cases a Single Sign-On (SSO) solution is a best practice so that authentication will be done only once.

1) Native Salesforce Authentication:

If you do not have a system where your end-users are logging into, you will probably just stay with the native option that authenticate through simple user name and password.

Salesforce has a login page pre-built for you that supports user name and password for authentication.

Login url for production and developer orgs – http://login.salesforce.com
Login url for sandboxes – http://test.salesforce.com

2) Delegated Authentication:

It is the single sign-on solution(SSO) that enables you to integrate Salesforce with an authentication method that you choose. This enables you to integrate salesforce authentication with your LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) server, or perform single sign-on by authenticating using a token instead of a username/password.

This solution works well if you have an existing intranet site where your customers are already logging into. You must contact Salesforce to enable this option in your Org.

Setup -> Administration Setup -> Security Controls -> Single Sign-On Settings

3) Federated Authentication:

This is a single sign-on solution(SSO) that uses SAML as the authentication method. This solution works well if you already have a federated SSO system in place. It can be a large undertaking to setup a new Federated SAML solution so keep that in mind.

You can go to Setup -> Administration Setup -> Security Controls -> Single Sign-On Settings and enable SAML for your Org.

4) Auth. Provider(Salesforce, OpenID, Facebook, twitter etc.):

In this mechanism you can enable social sign-on by allowing salesforce.com users to authenticate from a range of identity providers, including Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and even other salesforce.com orgs.

This option will be found under Setup -> Administration Setup -> Security Controls -> Auth Providers

Gopal Das
Follow me

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *