SSO for external client

[grayat]

Hi Canvas Community,

Has anyone tried or experienced configuring SSO for 3rd party or external set of users using this How do I configure third-party authentication prov... - Instructure Community - 225 (canvaslms.com)?

Our experience was not straight forward and had to do manual intervention on our end in SIS before the external users are able to log in on their premise via SSO.

Was that your case as well? Appreciate any experiences you can share. Thank you.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @grayat,

We use SAML authentication for our university users and it's really been pretty painless since we set it up years ago.

I notice your question mentions third-party/external users though, which is not necessarily the same as things would be for normal school/university Canvas users. Our sister campus uses a third-party social media login SSO provider for external users, and I don't think they had much trouble setting that up.  Can you elaborate on what you were trying to accomplish and what kind of issues you ran in to?  I think things like this may be very school/institution and provider specific.  Also, unless you're using just-in-time provisioning, the users have to exist in Canvas before they'd be able to log in through SSO, which I know has tripped some people up before.

Looking forward to hearing back from you with more details.

-Chris

[grayat]

Apologies for the very delayed response. It's now working for our clients' SSO. Actually it's more on their Azure side of set up that can be tricky sometimes because there may be a couple of parameters that can be missed in the in configuration. All we had to do on our side is add the SAML authentication and then provide the correct URL to the client.

Thanks @chriscas for your response.