You want effortless logins and no hassle with many passwords for your users. You need single sign-on. To enable single sign-on (SSO) on your site may sound scary but it really isn’t. My bold claim is that using some form of SSO makes sense for any website and that it is easy to implement.

In the session we will cover:

• Benefits of SSO for the different stakeholders.
• Different strategies for successful SSO.
• How to use different versions of Drupal in one site!
• Demo of CAS to underline that its not difficult.
  • setting up a central authentication server.
  • setting up a few client sites
  • Use profile fields and roles on the client sites
  • make the client sites blend in with one click.

SSO is based on a central server which handles your authentication (example: drupal.org) and clients that you are logged into automagically with the same account (example: amsterdam2014.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org) but for the purpose of proving the bold claim we relax the definition to allow almost-automatic logins from mozilla persona or facebook to count.

SSO makes sense on any scale: Whether you are bothered by your brother who forgot the password to his blog that you created for him or whether you have clients that need three accounts on your systems for the documentation wiki, the issue/ticket system and their own site, you could make your life easier by implementing a form of single sign on.

If, however, you run a community site and you want to delegate the creation and maintenance of the subsystems to others but give your users a smooth experience, there is no way around SSO. Drupal or other NGOs (speakers experience with 13’000 members) are good examples for that. This is also true of course for other big sites (google, europa.eu) that can be subdivided to keep things sane.

SSO allows you to build simpler sites into a more complex web experience. It allows you even to update your website to Drupal 8 in chunks rather than all at once. The user data and roles can be carried across the sections of the site. If some thought is given to the architecture it can even be introduced on a existing site.