I’ve started a project to move the front-end of our intranet from SharePoint to WordPress (SP is just too icky to do any serious front-end work with). The plan is for WordPress to become the front-end and CMS for news-type content, keep SharePoint for file library and calendar-type stuff (at least for now), and use the SP web services to integrate the SP content into WP. All of the various authentications involved must be transparent to the end-user.

Goal #1 was to get all the Kerberos stuff worked out so that Apache would transparently authenticate users against Active Directory (assuming they’re logged into a Windows client machine with their domain account—a reasonable assumption for an intranet, although a good experience logging on from an iPad or other non-domain client is also disirable). It took a bit of trial-and-error, but I got it working! WooHoo!!!

Goal #2 will be to fire up WordPress and get it to recognize that Apache already knows who the user is, create a new WordPress account if it doesn’t already exist, and log the user into WordPress.

This should be fun… 😉