This topic is a continuation of the discussion that originated in the Technical Support forum. http://www.activemodules.com/Commun...fault.aspx

The purpose of this topic is to gauge interest along with possible use case scenarios for sharing users across portals.

DotNetNuke does support shared user accounts across portals but the profile for each user is unique to each portal. There are pros and cons to this configuration depending on the particular needs for the site.

Also need to consider how activity related to a profile is shared, if at all.

I think it is a good idea but sounds like a lot of work. I can see how I can use these feature and save a lot of money. I never ran multiple portals so I do not know how it performs.

Also consider your business scenarios for support. If I can run 30 communities with AS license that saves me a lot of money. But I believe you may see increased support request.

Also need to consider how activity related to a profile is shared, if at all.

If you build this feature then activity should be shared across portals in my opinion. It should have options to share or not(I believe that will be a long list). This will open up many options and can be used in different ways.

Will,

I was very interested to hear your thoughts on this issue.  Let me set out a hypothetical use as I would such a feature and maybe some requirements.

Let's say I run 3 websites offering fantasy sports leagues.  Each website is a league for a different sport.  Let's say football, basketball, and hockey.  Let's say that I have a user on the football site that is also a basketball fan.  He follows a link I've placed to the basketball site and decides he wants to create his basketball team.  He logs in with the same credentials as the other site.

I think we're all together up until this point.

Now Will, what you're saying on the other thread is that profile information is portal specific and not easily shared.  I am totally OK with that.  I can image that my user may not want the same profile on both sites.  Maybe he wants different profile pics on each site with him in the uniform of his favorite team.  When he goes to his profile on the second site, it should perhaps give him the option to copy his profile information over from the other site, or enter totally new information.  It should also copy any forum or other preferences over to the new site (including privacy settings.)  It should perhaps know when profiles are updated on any site and ask if the user wants the changes copied (or provide a way to automatically synchronize if desired).

If down the road I decide to add a baseball site, I'd like a seamless way to integrate the new site without a ton of setup.

To be honest, this approach seems to make the most sense.  From what Will says, this is more of a single sign-on solution than a 'portal user sharing' situation if I am not mistaken.  Almost every other module I've ever used stores it's data in a portal specific way.  Files in the portal folder etc.  The very nature of the platform is to separate out portals/sites.  I don't think there's any way to easily make content or other things multi portal aware without the developers making major changes. 

For me, if there is a single signon solution with the ability for users to duplicate their profile info, that would be acceptable for me.

The problem really seems to be when it comes to security roles.  Since roles are also portal specific, having one role for say a premium membership that stretches across all sites would be difficult.  Perhaps this is where active purchase could come in and be multi-site aware and give the option to purchase a cross site membership.