The New Citrix Authentication Landscape

Thursday, 07 December 2006 by Michel Roth

Jay Tomlin has blogged on the new and future authentication capabilities of Citrix: As I mentioned in a previous post, Web Interface now supports federated authentication. From a Citrix perspective, Federation allows a user to be authenticated in their home domain and then run applications on a Presentation Server that resides in a different (and untrusted) domain. Web Interface 4.5 officially supports Microsoft's Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). You can find all the details in Appendix B of the Web Interface 4.5 Administrator's Guide.

As it turns out, ADFS is just the beginning of the story. The work Citrix did to enable support for Federation has opened up a host of other authentication options that have never before been possible, like web portal SSO, soft certificate logins and third-party single sign-on where the user needn't know their domain password. Before we get into all these new possibilities, let me explain how Citrix supports ADFS and why it means more than just ADFS.

Read it all here.