I will present the approach the WeNMR project takes towards central user management, SSO and accounting. In this approach, the WeNMR Virtual Research community (VRC) website functions as a hub for all activity. The VRC uses Drupal as content management system providing a rich ecosystem of support modules to extend Drupals functionality.
We developed a custom, flexible yet generic module for Drupal to allow our community users to easily subscribe to the various services the project has to offer and enable SSO for all of these. The module exposes a flexible API to WeNMR service providers to perform user authentications and accounting.
Being a native Drupal module, it can benefit, almost out-of-the-box, from other modules offering various ways of user authentication such as SAML, Shibboleth, OAuth, OpenID and more. I will discuss some of these in relation to our module.