SharePoint User Group UK

I hope this isn't 1) a stupid question or 2) something that's been covered before (I couldn't see a posting, but maybe I've missed it!), but can anyone help this noob?

In  a nutshell, my question is: can we use Sharepoint as both our intranet site and our website? 
As an intranet site, this would be where myself and my colleagues, and (eventually, IT department-permitting) invited external colleagues can keep our team sites updated, but also, as a website, where selected parts of our intranet are viewable to the public. 

A lot of what we do is "for" and "with" all councils in Scotland, the Scottish Government, and other public sector organisations, and trying to maintain 2 sets of info which essentially often pertain to the same thing is not an ideal situation (I'm sure we are not alone in this!).  If we could selectively choose which parts of what we are doing as part of our jobs, that we are sharing with each other anyway, and publish them to a universally viewable platform, this would be immensely helpful.

If MOSS can't do this, can anyone give me a clue as to any other avenue we could pursue? 

Many thanks!

Tessa

P.S. Not sure if it's relevant, but our current website www.improvementservice.org.uk is build with Joomla! open source software, so whatever we move to (if we do) needs to accommodate what we already have/do.

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Tessa Darley, Knowledge Management and Community of Practice Adviser

Hi Tessa

In answer to first question, i personally don't think there is such a thing as a stupid question.In answer to your second question yes sharepoint can be be sued to run and intranet and extranet, though you will need to have the correct licences. And the ability to be able to publish to your internet site from Sharepoint is built into the out of the box stuff :)

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Andrew Carter
.Net & SharePoint Consultant

See my blog at: http://blog.apc-solutions.co.uk

Hi Andrew, thanks for your speedy response.

My next questions are to anyone who has actually done this - how easy is it to do this, administer it and plan/control it, how well does it work in practice, and how does it look to the outside world?  I am not a developer, just a sometime (by default) administrator for our SharePoint site, and having seen other SharePoint sites, I am bound to say that they aren't particularly pretty, and all have a certain MOSS "feel" to them that we would not necessarily want.  Any that do not look totally MOSS-like have usually had a lot of money spent on developing them that way.  We do not have that sort of resource in-house and buying it in would be prohibitively costly.

Also (at risk of asking a genuinely silly question or two - regardless of your assurances Andrew, I still worry! :)) would the site require people to log in to view it (as is the case at present with our intranet site), and would it be indexed by the search engines?

Thanks again.

Tessa

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Tessa Darley, Knowledge Management and Community of Practice Adviser

No worries :), setting up MOSS to be external and internal is resonably straight forward (will require some effort though as well as requiring the infrastructure to be in place to suit), but like most things will require getting the planning right, things like security, etc. You could create a site to allow anyone to view it or require the users to log in (or both)

As for changing the look and feel, its not that hard to change the look and feel, but as you have stated, to get away from the MOSS look, you really would at least need Sharepoint Designer and some understanding of web development to really make it look different.

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Andrew Carter
.Net & SharePoint Consultant

See my blog at: http://blog.apc-solutions.co.uk

Thanks again Andrew.....

Can you point me in the direction of anyone/any websites that actually do this?

Thanks

Tessa

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Tessa Darley, Knowledge Management and Community of Practice Adviser

Hi,

This link will take you to a site which lists around 175 public facing websites all hosted on MOSS 2007. 

http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/websites.aspx

These will demonstrate the art of the possible with regard to the look and feel of a MOSS site.

My employer developed a combined Web Site and Extranet for Virgin Vie at Home (http://www.virginvieathome.com). When you view the site you will notice two login options on the menu at the bottom of the page, these provide secure access for two separate groups of users; customers and sales consultants. 

In your post you do not specify whether you are considering Windows SharePoint Services or Office SharePoint Server.  Both can be used to create publicly accessible web sites, or secure Extranet sites but there is a huge difference in functionality and cost.  Typically one would be using MOSS for the public facing web sites.  The intranet based team sites and the Extranet could be either.

WSS is free in terms of licensing, but you will be limited with regard to the functionality and look and feel.

MOSS will provide richer functionality for web content management which could address your problems with maintaining two sets of content. But has a license cost in the region of £20k per server for public web sites.

If you are providing sites for the public sector then you may also face issues with Accessibility.  Out of the box SharePoint does not deliver accessible sites.  AA compliance can be achieved but with additional expense and effort.

MOSS is designed to address exactly the types of scenario that you describe and once set up it would provide a powerful and user friendly environment.  I would strongly advise that you seek experienced support in making your technology selection.  If you decide to go the SharePoint route then you will almost certainly require the support of a professional services organisation such as a Microsoft partner to get set up.   The Partner Directory on the Microsoft web site could be a useful starting point.

I would also recomend that you consider breaking the project into distinct phases.  You could begin with the Intranet and workout through the Extranet then the Web site, or begin with the Web site and work inwards.  Doing all three together would be a huge challenge.

Hope these quick comments are of use.

Regards,

S:)

 

 

 

 

 

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Symon Garfield

Hi Tessa,

I have recent experience from creating a combined intranet, extranet and website solution on MOSS.

As others already said, this is very much possible and supported, but needs the usual cycle of planning, design and development - so at least a work package if not a whole project.

Just a word of caution: my team hit a surprising number of technical issues and even "bugs" when approaching this from the "one content, many ways to access" principle.  So much so that we implemented an intranet with over 100 sites and workspaces in about 2 months (with a team of 3), but then spent the same amount of time just getting things to work for external users and visitors! It turned out that quite a few things in Sharepoint are simply not intended for use on public websites and thus will not work without considerable custom development. These range from certain web parts to approval workflows (which you will typically need if allowing external users to post content) and all but the most basic document libraries.

On the "re-use" of content across intra/extranet and a website: this certainly possible technically speaking, but you have to consider the business complications: typically content to be published externally needs to be re-edited for the purpose, and approved before publishing. You thus end up with two related, but different sets of content.

In the around a dozen projects where I have seen such "re-use" specified as a requirement at the start, it has never actually been implemented. Not so much because of any technical difficulty, but because it usually turns out that this is more about business process; i.e. keeping tabs on new and changed content across the different sites, and sharing that information between the people responsible for those sites.

Regards,

Pauli Visuri

 

 

Dear S and Pauli

Many thanks indeed for your very helpful posts.  Lots of very useful advice and it's great to be able to reap the benefit of your experience.  I now have a number of points to work into my report and a much better idea of some of the potential issues we could face if we were to go down the route of a combined site.  It definitely needs some serious consideration and I'll be tapping into this site for more grist to the mill, so I hope people keep posting, as I'll be using these posts as reference.

I'll also post back any feedback or other outcome from this.

Thanks again, it's very much appreciated!

Tessa

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Tessa Darley, Knowledge Management and Community of Practice Adviser