I am seeing 2 disctinct scenarios with usernames and portals.

1) You want a user to sign up in a portal and immediately be able to use the same credentials in other portals.

2) You want to be able to use the same username in multiple portals and have each one be a spearate account.

What do people think about the following solution:

• Create a table to group portals together i.e. PortalGroupID, PortalID
• Modify all the usernames in those portals  to include the PportalGroupID such as [PORTALID]_UserName
• Update the login control
  • If there is a PortalGroupID that has the current portal in it Prepend the token "_PortalGroupID_" to the username
  • If there isn't a portal group for the current portal, just prepend "PortalID_" to the username

I think this way, you will either have a unique username for a given portal or you will have a unique username for that group.  Obviously there are a numbe of adminstrative details that would need to happen, such as updating usernames when a portal is added or removed from a group....

Here are the issues as I see them for this solution:

1. Host accounts- DNN needs to see ifyou are logging in as a host which would be unrelated to a specific portal. Perhaps there should be a specific host login page. I.e. domainname.com/HostLogin.aspx.  That would solve this issue as the HOstLogin page would know what kind of look up to do.
2. Methods in the membership provider that would need updates are:
   • UserLogin
   • GetUserByUserName
   • Add User
   • GetUserRolesByUsername
   • GetUsersByUsername- not quite sure what the difference between this and the
3. UI issues- We have display name as a field, but the username gets used a lot.  DNN would need to modify this property so that it strips off the PortalID info.

Another route to take would be to extend the aspnet_Users table to include Portal Information.  This seems to have some merit since all the changes would be pretty well buried in the core, so 3rd party modules should still work.  Is there a reason noone has added this functionality to that table?

I posted the code of a db trigger to automatically enable new or update users to access all portals at this link http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/108/threadid/143210/scope/posts/Default.aspx