Integrating MOSS 2007 with Community Server - Part 1
To begin the integration process, you will need to understand how to enable form authentication in MOSS. I used MeiYin's blog post as a reference point to get things started.
Assuming you already have community server (for SGDotNet, the version we are using currently is 2.1 beta) installed and running, and MOSS web applications created in the default zone and extranet zone...
Step 1: Define the Providers
Open up the web.config for the Community Server, and copy the connectionStrings, the membership provider settings and the role provider settings to the web.config for the central admin and extranet zone.
Step 2: Copy these assemblies from the Community Server Bin directory
The following assemblies is required for the provider to function properly.
1. CommunityServer.ASPNet20MemberRole.dll
2. CommunityServer.Components.dll
Reason being, CommunityServer prior to Version 3 is built on top of the Backport of ASP.Net 2.0 Membership Provider. More details can be found here. Without these assemblies, you will be redirected to a SharePoint error page, telling you that a file is not found. You will lose Central Administrator as well.
Why so much cancellation? Well, since SharePoint can use any authentication providers, I thought I can use CommunityServer's authentication provider, since this post used so many bombastic words that I can't be sure if I can use Asp.Net's supplied providers. (Ok, my English isn't good too). But after trying to use CommunityServer's authentication provider, even though I can access central admin's home page, when I navigate to the operations or application tab, all hell break lose. At first it was missing files, then SharePoint keep giving me access denied, and I've used almost every account in the domain.
So what I have done on my development machine at home is just the copy the settings from the community server web.config, and replace the name and type to asp.net's provider, and it is working fine. In fact, I've just changed SgDotNet's CommunityServer to use asp.net provider, in preparation for MOSS...