We're currently investigating what kind of authentication we want to use for a sharepoint portal site : Forms Authentication or Windows Authentication. The latter has my preference.
What suprised me (I'm a sharepoint noob), is the fact that MS didn't provide a component/web-part that handles account management when using Windows Authentication.
Do you now how to do this? Without resorting to buying an additional product. Shouldn't it be very easy to access the Active Directory by code (C#)?
Best Answer
Windows Authentication
I echo Justin's thoughts regarding AD management. Adding users to your domain also doesn't necessarily have anything to do with adding them to SharePoint. However perhaps there is an IIS add-on that does this if you wish to pursue it.
If you don't already know, SharePoint can automatically import user profiles from your Active Directory domain. This makes them available for assigning permissions within the sites.
Some additional info from Justin's comment about changing the AD structure to administer security: With SharePoint 2007 you no longer need to rely on Active Directory to manage groups of users. It's possible to also use SharePoint groups (which can contain AD users or AD groups). This works really well when you need to create a group for a purpose that isn't applicable outside SharePoint and you don't want to bug the infrastructure team. The downside is that without education, end users probably won't manage this well and it can become a mess.
Forms Authentication
It's true there is very little provided by Microsoft for managing this. However the Community Kit for SharePoint provides this functionality. From memory I had to tweak their code a bit but I was generally happy with it.
If you are considering this option also read this MSDN article.