Managing external authentication

External authentication services

Kentico supports several external authentication methods out of the box. To use them on your site, you have to configure them first (click on respective links for instructions) and place a corresponding web part on a page in your website.

Authenticating users against an external database

You can customize the authentication process to check the submitted user names and passwords against an external database outside of Kentico. For this purpose you can use the SecurityEvents class, which provides these events:

Authenticate - occurs when authenticating users.
AuthorizeResource - occurs when checking the permissions for modules.
AuthorizeClass - occurs when performing security checks for object type or page type permissions.
AuthorizeUIElement - occurs when checking permissions for UI elements.
SignOut - occurs when a user signs out from a website.

See Reference - Global system events for other events.

For a code example of custom external authentication handling, see Handling custom external authentication.

Importing users into Kentico

For importing users from external databases into Kentico, you have these options:

Using external authentication
- When a user signs in to Kentico using an external authentication service (e.g., Facebook), the system creates their account in the Kentico database and imports their profiles. See the respective links at the beginning of this page.
Importing users using Kentico AD Import Utility
- Using the Kentico AD Import Utility, you can import users and groups (roles in Kentico) from Active Directory into a Kentico database.
- See Importing users and roles from Active Directory for instructions.
Importing users using the Kentico Import Toolkit
- The Kentico Import Toolkit to import can import various data from external sources. You can also use it to import users from one SQL database into Kentico.
- See Example - importing users using the Kentico Import Toolkit for instructions.