AD integrations with WCC and WCS

There are few subtle differences in the way AD integration works with WCC and WCS apps.

For WCC its pretty straight forward through the WebLogic layer itself, by adding/configuring the ActiveDirectory Provider. If you need the Security Groups as well coming up from AD, the groups can be added directly in AD and can be sourced along with the users for authentication/authorization purposes.

If required, only users can be sourced from AD for authentication, and authorization can be handled through WCC itself.

WCC keeps a local copy of the user, in the database and allows the authorization to run from WCC. Also, the connecting user in the config can be a read only user in AD.

For WCS, its a bit different though.

The WCS ACLs needs to be created as is in AD, irrespective of either you are integrating fully (with Sites, Roles, ACLs and users info coming from AD) or partially (with only the users and ACLs coming from AD and Sites,Roles from WCS).

There is no way to just source the users from AD and all security related stuff sourcing from WCS.

Also, WCS does not keep a copy of local users, once integrated with AD. All users are sourced and pulled up from AD, in the user management screens, and applying  these ACLs to users are also updated directly in AD.

For this reason, the user configured to connect to AD in the config, needs to have Write permissions in AD, else the updates will fail while applying the ACLs to users.

Utils are available for you to integrate WCS with AD, but best way is to configure yourself by manually editing the required files, dir.ini, futuretense.ini or futuretense_excel.ini, so that you know whats happening 🙂

Before you do the WCS-AD integration, create a user with user admin privileges in WCS, so that it can be used to provide access to other users.

You will have to edit the user data in the database table USERPUBLICATION to have the username as in AD’s distinguished name like: ‘CN=pradeepm,CN=Users,DC=oracle,DC=com’ for all the relevant rows.

You can follow the official documentation for the integration and keep these points handy.