[Mailman-Users] Authentication, portal integration, etc.

[Dale Ghent]

Hey all, I hope your holidays went well.

I have a few questions that I hope some one can answer or point me in 
the correct direction. I'm a long time admin of Mailman installations, 
but I was just recently given a project that would appear to stretch 
what I know already about its internals.

I work for a university, and we run about 1600 mailing lists on a 
server using *groan* CREN ListProc. Obviously, we're looking to get 
away from that to something modern and waaaay more user serviceable.

To take advantage of a migration to something modern and easier to 
manage, such as Mailman, I would like to fully integrate Mailman into 
our university's web portal. This portal, which is single sign-on, 
offers a slew of services for students and staff, and I would like for 
these people to also be able to maintain their university mailing list 
subscriptions through it. Ie, after they're signed on and authenticated 
using our webauth system, be able to view which lists they are 
members/owners of, be able to change their subscription options, unsub, 
etc.

I would also like to maintain this functionality for our non-university 
list memebers, ergo, present them with the "traditional" mailman user 
interface.

So the questions:

1) Authentication. How could one make a web-based single sign on system 
work side-by-side with Mailman's standard authentication? I've read 
about Mailman 2.1.x having module capabilities, but I've looked around 
and found no docs which describe this or the API.

2) Does anyone know of an organization which has already tackled 
something like this?

TIA
/dale