Using BCS to retrieve data using multiple possible accounts

Question

We have a third party application we need to connect to using BCS to display info in our SharePoint 2010 Intranet. The third party application exposes web services we can consume to get the information. However, it only allows 5 simultaneous sessions for each set of credentials. The problem might arise on production where 60 users might connect simultaneously so we would need 12 sets of credentials from the third party application since we will connect with pre-determined credentials from the app, and not with the user identity. I am considering the possible authentication approaches to follow. One option is to write a Windows application that will take each 5 users and map them to one set of credentials from the third party app within BCS. This way, whenever a user is attempting to connect, we are sure they will not be kicked out since they share the credentials with only 4 other people. But at the same time, we have to map each user that will be added to our company in the future. The second option would be to keep it dynamic. When the user is attempting to connect, we check to see which set of credentials has less than five sessions open and then use that. While this seems to require less future maintenance, I am not sure it is feasible. Any suggestions about how I should proceed? Thank you.

Answer 1

First option seems brittle, I would definitely vote for second option. For this to work, you need to find if session is still valid in application. Do you know if third party application supports an API method for session validity?

PS: I know my response is not answer worthy, but don't have enough points to comment. But interesting question.