Hey Guys
I am the director of a custom web solution company in New Zealand.
I'm new to umbraco today but my business partner has been using it for several sites.
In the past few hours, i've figured out how to create and edit pages, templates, member groups, and macros using user-controls.
I've worked with webservices and .net 2 for quite some time and have extensive experience with javascript and general programming techniques...
Anyway, enough about me..I just wanted to make it clear that I have a solid set of skills to utilize; my problem is this:

Our current project uses Umbraco for the customer facing site, but we have built the client an internal web application which will be holding their customer data.
We need to provide a secure section on the customer facing site which requires a username and password to authenticate to- but the content for the secure section needs to be customizable from the CMS.
The problem is, we don't want to maintain two sets of username and password lists, one in the CMS via membership, and another in the client's backend web application- ie: we don't want to have their customer record twice.
I've put a user control into a login page, which renders a login form and I can authenticate against a sql database/custom webservice to validate the username and password but what i'm stuck on is how to tell the CMS that said user is logged in so that umbraco will allow access to the secured pages.
I've checked the session variables from the user control, and none are being used, so I guess I need to authenticate to umbraco.

I don't really want to build a synchronisation module which keeps the umbraco membership database up to date, or copy data from the custom system db to the user table on the cms via database triggers and the like, so what options do I have?

I've found the membership api, but it seems I can only update/create/delete/check access for a specific page.. not fake a membership login.

Someone give me some rope, so I can hang myself, please :)

Gareth Evans
Sniper Systems Limited