Possible and appropriate with Services?

Hi all

A business partner and I are having a heated discussion regarding site architecture.... and the Services module

We want to have users login to a drupal site - "portal" - and then based on the results of a database lookup, be able to then browse other drupal sites - "community1" "community2" etc without having to login separately.

My partner thinks that the login can be done via the Services module. I disagree.

My understanding is that Services has the capacity to access another site, and can be set up to login to that site and perform actions (based on the method called etc....), but that it is predicated on making a "round trip". So in this case, you could login to the portal, and from there access other drupal sites (running Services of course..) and even login to those sites programmatically and "do stuff" non-interactively, but after the Services call ends, you are still at the portal.

He thinks that somehow a logged-in, interactive web browser session on a "community" site can be initiated from the "portal" via Services.

Any idea who is right?

I have done some experiments via cURL and have been able to login and show a user page -- but it seems that the session ends once the cURL call is over, because if you click a link on the user page, you are denied access. My assumption is that cURL and Services are alike in that they allow access to other URLs, and are used specifically BECAUSE they run in the background rather than involve interactive browsing.

Bakery looks like it will work, but we will also need to LIMIT access and Bakery seems to give you access to ALL other drupal site subdomains.

Any help or insights would be appreciated!