As the flow above dictates, the CyberStore application’s user session must validate the user. Therefore, to maintain a single-sign-on experience for the length of time that a user is active, that session must remain valid. By definition, a session remains valid as long as a user remains active. An active user interacts with the application by posting new requests to a server before the session times out or the application (a browser) closes. The timeout limit can be set in CyberStore to a chosen value (in minutes) in the application’s "Management Console."
However, when a user leaves the CyberStore Site to go to another Site in the web presence, they are not interactively submitting requests to the CyberStore server. Therefore, the user cannot keep the session alive without returning to the Site.
In order to deal with this predicament, CyberStore Connect has a keep alive function. By simply placing a standard <IMG> tag on a specific “keep-alive” image (Connect_Spacer.aspx) immediately after the <BODY> tag in the HTML of every page (or more ideally into its theme, skin, master page or template) of a connected application, the user interacts with the connected application’s server. Once the user is authorized, the CyberStore session is maintained. The user must repeat this process every time for it to be effective.