Login to Sitecore instance using Azure Active directory

Refer the below steps to integrate Sitecore Identity Server with Azure AD.

1. Create Application in Azure AD

Create an application in Azure Active directory and in Redirect URI, add the URL of your Sitecore Identity resource with suffix \”/signin-oidc\”.

Once your application will be created. Go to Authentication & enable ID tokens as illustrated below.

Click Save and then Go to Manifest & change the value of the \”groupMembershipClaims\” setting to \”SecurityGroup\”. This will instruct Azure AD to pass along the identifiers of all Security Groups the authenticated user is a member of in the claims back to Sitecore Identity.

Click on Save & then copy Application ID & Directory (tenant) ID which will be required in next steps.

2. Update Sitecore Identity instance configuration

Go to Identity service and open /Sitecore/Sitecore.Plugin.IdentityProvider.AzureAd.xml file.

Change the Enabled node to true.

In the ClientId and TenantId nodes, paste the GUIDs copied in above step.

3. Map group membership in Active Directory to roles in Sitecore

In this step, map a group of Azure Active Directory, which will become Administrators in our Sitecore instance.

Copy the Object ID which will be required in next steps

Again, go to Identity service and open /Sitecore/Sitecore.Plugin.IdentityProvider.AzureAd.xml file and add groups that contains the Object ID of our Azure AD group. This claim is being passed from Azure AD to our Sitecore Identity Server & it tells Sitecore that this user is an Administrator.

4. CM instance Configuration for Authentication

Go to CM instance & open Sitecore.Owin.Authentication.IdentityServer.config file located in App_Config/Sitecore/Owin.Authentication.IdentityServer and uncomment identity provider “SitecoreIdentitySever/IdS4-AzureAd” as shown below.

5. Now let’s test this & login to Sitecore Instance using Azure AD. 

Enter your Azure AD credentials & your CM instance homepage will be opened.

I hope this information helped you. If you have any feedback, questions or suggestions for improvement please let me know in the comments section.

Comparison between Azure Search & Solr

Let\’s discuss some of the limitation of Azure Cognitive Search:

1. Substring searches that are limited to a single term, for instance, predicates, .StartsWith(), .EndsWith(), and .Contains()

2. Regular expressions spanning multiple terms (containing spaces) returns 0 results.

3. Multiple terms that are passed to .Wildcard() are interpreted as individual wildcards in a field-scoped query.

4. The facet values are calculated based on individual terms in faceted fields, not on whole field values, when a value contains multiple words, (unlike Lucene and Solr).

5. An Azure Cognitive Search index can only contain up to 1000 fields.

6. Join queries such as: .GroupJoin(), .SelfJoin(), and other operators that join queries, is not supported and results in an error.

7. Media indexing feature is not supported.

8. Range queries on string fields always operate on the whole field value without tokenization and are case-sensitive.

Refer this article for more details: https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/90/platform-administration-and-architecture/en/sitecore-azure-search-overview.html

The above functionalities are working as expected in Solr Search. Let’s compare between Azure Search & Solr Search:

	Azure Search	Solr
Max Simple fields per index	1000	No Limit
Max Complex collection fields per index	40	No Limit
Max elements across all complex collections per document	3000	No Limit
Max depth of complex fields	10	No Limit
Max suggesters per index	1	No Limit
Max scoring profiles per index	100	No Limit
Max functions per profile	8	No Limit

Please refer the below documentation to check Azure Search & Solr cost:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/search/

https://www.searchstax.com/solr-as-a-service/pricing/

Conclusion: Solr\’s cost is same as Azure Search. Solr Search is more powerful than Azure Search. I would recommend to use Solr with Sitecore instances.

I hope this information helped you. If you have any feedback, questions or suggestions for improvement please let me know in the comments section.