Delegated authentication allows Salesforce to accept a user’s credentials / authentication token, but pass to an external service for validation. Delegated authentication is similar to single sign-on (SSO), but it offers a slightly different experience to users.
With delegated authentication, one system relies on another system to validate user credentials. For example, you can configure your Salesforce org to rely on a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server to validate credentials. Both SSO and delegated authentication enable users to log in to multiple apps with one set of credentials. However, with delegated authentication, users must log in to each app separately.
Basic requirements
- Authentication gateway provides SOAP web service which complies with Salesforce delegated authentication WSDL
- Delegated authentication is enabled in Salesforce and gateway endpoint URL added
What else to know
- Is Single Sign-On Enabled permission
- Directs users’ login credentials to authentication service
- Password management functionality disabled
- Multi-factor authentication must use other Salesforce methods
Considerations for choosing Delegated Authentication
- Helpful to support SSO from legacy systems without SAML / OpenID Connect
- Using the basic flow (without authentication tokens), plain text passwords exposed to more systems
- Password reminders & resets may be less intuitive
- No native capability to share attributes from authentication gateway with Salesforce
Recording
Further Learning
Amit Chaudhary is Salesforce Application Architect and working on Salesforce Platform since 2010. He is Salesforce MVP since 2017 and have 13 Salesforce Certificates.
He is a active blogger and founder of Apex Hours.