SharePoint User Group UK

Hello,

I have a SharePoint Services 3.0 question, regarding the deployment as an extranet, here is the situation.

·         Company Network, running Windows Small Business Server 2003. WSS 3.0 is installed and currently being used by the internal employees.

·         We have an exchange server and web server which hosts a website.

·         We would like the sharepoint site to be accessible outside of the company firewall over the internet to both employees and also people who don’t use the internal company computers (not on the active directory).

Firstly is this possible?

Secondly, that are the issues, pros/cons and requirements in terms of hardware and software.

Thank You for your time and let me know if you need more information.

We are currently in a discussion with our IT team (who aren’t the most co-operative department in our company!)

Thanks,

Pritesh Patel

Yes, this is possible.

The key issue is how you go about authenticating external users and where you store/manage thier credentials.

The easiest cheapest and best solution is to deploy an ISA server to web publish (aka reverse proxy) your sharepoint site(s) to the internet using forms based auth over SSL using windows accounts stored in your existing Active Directory.

However, if your IT people don't like non employee data in AD you can have a SQL Server (or ADAM) instance to store thier creds seperate from the AD and mix them on the SharePoint side.

hth

S.