If you’re like Intridea, you’re using Google Apps for the Domain to handle your e-mail, calendaring, etc. You may also have a good number of web applications out there than have some kind of administrative interface. It’s always such a pain dealing with authentication to that interface, isn’t it? You can do a few different things:
* Make your own users on the system superusers. This means you have to have some kind of console intervention usually.
* Throw up a simple HTTP Basic gateway with a shared user/password for the admin area. This often gets hardcoded, again not a fantastic way to do it.
* Do some kind of IP restriction or other server configuration magic. This seems tenuous at best.
So what’s a developer to do? Well, as it turns out that by using OpenID with Google Apps for the Domain, you can have a secure administrative gateway tied directly into your company’s Apps ecosystem!
