Question

Am I doing this right?

I have a client, they currently have a portal for their users, all their users are in an oracle database. They want to move to SharePoint 2010.

The user will log into the site via their username and password, which I will need to migrate from their existing database. The users also have account information, which I’ll need to query FROM their existing database in Oracle (over a VPN tunnel from the web front end to their Oracle DB).

1. For the user authentication;
   ASP.NET Membership –
   I tried to configure my application to run under FBA. The aspnet_regsql.exe application created Users and Roles tables in my database (and a whole bunch of other ones). I need to add account_id, which is a foreign key to the client’s database, and firstname, last name, which we’ll store and need to surface on our application.

Where to I create the account_id and other fields that need to be associated to the user?

Is the ASPNET Profile table the same as the SharePoint Profile from the API? How do I populate this database to try?

Through IIS? Do I need to write a custom registration webpart, or can I somehow add custom columns to the profile and reprovision the ASP.NET user registration control in a visual webpart?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Answer 1

1. The ASPNet profile table is not the same as the SharePoint Profile. The SharePoint Profiles are assigned their own database thus much more robust where as theASPNET profile contains all of the propertynames/values for a single user in a single row, not really the best deal.
2. Your can use IIS to populate the users/roles, but you need to keep changing the Default Role and Membership providers. One way will let you add users and roles, but not let you log into SharePoint. The other vice versa. You can create the properties for the profile and assign them default values but I don’t beleive you can set them on a user by user basis, I won’t swear to that though. I found this tool on codeplex for FBA management but have not had time to test it yet.
3. I am also trying to figure out the FBA/user profile question. SharePoint is smart enough to create profiles for Windows accounts. I am hoping that once the providers for FBA are created it will pull the users name and basic info from the FBA provider and create SharePoint profiles as well so that I can use the UserProfileManager to access/store profile based information from the SharePoint profile database. It looks like you can configure the User Profile Service to sync with other sources, thats what I am going to investigate once I have some more free time.