I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to figure out exactly what I can and can’t do with FBA in SharePoint and thought I’d write a quick blog about my experiences. It turns out there are a couple of hurdles you’ll have to overcome that at first might not be obvious.
Setting Up FBA in SharePoint
First of all you need to set up your SharePoint Environment to use FBA. There are several decent blogs and articles out there about this, so rather than reinvent the wheel here are a couple to choose from:
or
I also discovered that it was important to properly set “applicationName” when I played around and broke FBA. This article explains it fairly well:
SharePoint FBA Limitations
By no means is this an exhaustive list, just a couple of things I’ve run across using FBA. I will definitely try to keep this list updated as I find more issues.
1. What Microsoft is willing to Share. :)
In one of the aforementioned links there is a nice list of FBA limitations… errr… differences when compared to Windows Authentication:
2. FBA Role Limitations
It is possible to add an FBA Role to a SharePoint Group and users in that FBA Role will be able to access the appropriate content of your site. However, if you use the same SharePoint Group as an Audience Setting in a Web Part it will NOT work properly for FBA users of that Role even though the Role is added to the SharePoint Group. It will work if you individually add the FBA user to the SharePoint Group though.
One work around I found was a project to write your on Content Editor Web Parts which recognized FBA Roles:
Hope there was something helpful here. Hey... I never said I knew ALOT about FBA in SharePoint. :)