Single Sign-On (Luminate Online as master) APIs permit a browser-based web application hosted on an external server to use Luminate Online as the master authentication server in a single-sign-on relationship. Typical criteria for using Luminate Online as master are:

• Integrating with a third-party CMS that does not have rich personalization capabilities.
• Integrating with an online community or other web application that will cater to a subset of your online users (the Luminate Online database will be a superset of your online users).

In general, when a new user comes to any of your web applications, you may want to log them in or register them with Luminate Online for email marketing, and use Luminate Online to manage the account.

To establish a single sign-on session using Luminate Online as the master authenticator, use either login or authenticateUser. Before logging the user in, you may use loginTest to check the user's status. The loginTest method returns a cons_id if the user is already logged in or could be logged in because of a "remember me" cookie.

See also Single Sign On (Luminate Online as client) for information on implementing single sign-on using the external system as master authenticator.

To maintain the logged-in Luminate Online session alive beyond its 15-minute time-out, the partner web site only needs to include an image tag that references a servlet on the Luminate Online site:

<img src=http://www.foo.org/site/PixelServer />			

This will render a 1x1 clear GIF image that will maintain the session while the user remains connected.