I'm currently doing work for an association of non-profit foundations. Each member foundation has multiple users that would be accessing the site. The current needs are quite simple. All user account management will be done centrally by the association staff. All users from the member organizations will have the same security privileges (which is access to the members only section of the website). There's typically only a few users (at most a dozen) for each member organization, so for example, if an organization leaves the association, it's feasable (although not fun) to manually locate and delete the individual user accounts. There's also a requirement to have a membership directory with profile information both at the organizational level as well as individual user level.

I've been mapping out on paper how I might approach this... Form and List for maintaining the member organizations and associated profile information, putting the organization name in a specific user profile field to link a user account to a specific organization, and several ways to produce the directories (XML module or Reports module). But I thought I'd ask if anyone knew of existing modules/providers that addressed these requirements. Not only would it save me a little time, but it might also address future needs like allowing member organizations to maintain their own profile info and manage their own user accounts.

Thanks, Paul

I think that you should be looking at creating a custom Authentication Provider or finding a user management module that authenticates against the individual databases. Authenticating against one of a number of databases might be a stretch, but there are some member management things around.

Mitchell Sellers at Iowa Computer Gurus has a somewhat general purpose module. You have to provide a couple of methods for the code, and you might be able to use that to search one of a number of databases.

If you couple that with something like Dynamic Login from Data Springs, you might be able to "easily" pull profile information and create user accounts. I would also recommend looking at how this is done in the Active Directory Authentication Provider which can create user accounts when an AD user logs in for the first time.

Also, look at some of the modules from DNN Masters.

I think that you may have some custom coding to do but with some thought and consideration, I think that this can be done in the context of a custom Authentication Provider. They are "relatively" easy to create.

And, you can easily include configurations that would disable a member organization so that none of their members could login if their organization ceased to be a member.

If you want to contact me via the Contact Us form at http://patapscorg.com, I'd be happy to expand on some of these ideas.

Thanks so much Joe. Aside from "here's a $200 module that does everything you need", your response was exactly what I was hoping for. And I appreciate the offer to contact you again. I'll start to look at these and see what might come together.

I'll do a little more looking around and reading but my first question may have to do with the difference between Authentication Provider and Membership Provider.

Thanks again,
Paul