Federation Guides › Partnership Federation Guide › Partnership Creation and Activation › Partnership Creation

Partnership Creation

The main purpose of partnership federation is to establish a partnership between two organizations so they share user identity information and facilitate single sign-on (SSO). A partnership consists of two entities at different sites—one local and one remote. Either entity can assume the role of the asserting party, the side which produces assertions or the relying party, the side which consumes assertions.

If SiteMinder is installed at both sites, each site must define a partnership. For each local asserting party-to-relying party partnership at one site, there has to be a reciprocal local relying party-to-asserting party partnership at the partner site. For example, for the partnership configuration at SiteA, SiteA is a local Identity Provider (IdP) and SiteB is the remote Service Provider (SP). For the partnership configuration at SiteB, SiteB is the local Service Provider (SP) and SiteA is its remote Identity Provider (IdP). The perspective is based on the local entity.

The following figure shows the entity relationships for a partnership.

Note: An asserting party can have partnerships with more than one relying party and a relying party can establish partnerships with more than one asserting party.

To create a partnership, a partnership wizard takes you through the required configuration steps.