The Single Sign On (Part 1)

After the fiasco in Victorville, Haruna flew to the UK. Unfortunately, over there she got totally sick and was bedridden for several days.

During this time, she read a few of my blog posts and was a bit unhappy because she felt they depicted her in a rather negative light (which I don't deny). She then requested that I write a post which show her in somewhat more positively.

So here's an account of Haruna and the Kauai client.

The client is a small company on the island that runs exclusive, upscale tours for rich Japanese clients. Clients are picked up in Limos and given private tours by helicopters over lush, tropical forests and experience great views of various waterfalls and mountains.

The owners are an elderly Japanese couple named Yamamoto. They know Haruna through her dad back in Tokyo. Haruna visited them once, and seeing that they were still doing bookings on Windows 98 and MS Access, suggested that I come over to modernize their office.

So that's what I did. I stopped over and rewrote their main booking and accounting app on PHP in Azure Cloud. I also automated a lot of the "busy work", which previously was done by manually.

When most of the development was done, Haruna and I had a meeting on one of the final bits which we needed to address; and that was how to handle the global authentication (or Single Sign On, SSO) of all their new apps.

Mr. Yamamoto was an avid Facebook user and wanted us to use Facebook authentication. Mrs. Yamamoto, on the other hand, was a staunch Google user and wanted us to handle SSO through Google SAML.

"所以你感覺我們應該用啥呢？ [What do you want to use?]" asked Haruna.

"坦白說，用Microsoft EntraID比較有道理應為現在所有的系統都在Azure。但是問題是他們兩個人都不想要這個。[To be honest, we put all their apps on Azure, it makes more sense to use Office 365 Entra ID authentications. But neither of them want that.]" I replied.

"但是你感覺微軟是最好的嗎？[But you think Microsoft the best?]" asked Haruna.

"In this case, yeah I think so." I replied back in English.

"All right, then I'll take care of it." said Haruna with a devious smile.

"Wait what are you going to do?" I asked with a confused look.

"They're an old married couple, John. だから、任せてね[Therefore、just leave that to me]！"