Federation Manager Guide › User Directory Connections for Authentication › User Directory Management Overview

User Directory Management Overview

Directory connections resolve how Federation Manager establishes a context for user identities. Federation Manager uses these connections to verify user identities and retrieve user attributes contained in user stores.

The asserting party determines which users it can create assertions for by authenticating each user against a user directory. At the relying party, when the user's assertion is presented during authentication, the relying party looks in the user directory for the user record.

You configure connections to existing user directories through the User Directory tab in the Federation Manager UI. You are only establishing a connection to a user directory. You are not configuring a new user directory.

You can configure connections to more than one directory, and the directories do not have to be the same type (LDAP or ODBC).

Important! If you are using the SiteMinder Connector, the user directory must be configured to connect to the same directory that SiteMinder is pointing to, and it must be configured using the same name that SiteMinder uses for that directory.