SharePoint grabbing content from other Web Servers

[0ryx]

We would like to use SharePoint Portal Server 2003 as a portal webserver for our customers. This SPS will be published on the Internet by means of a ISA Server 2004 in our DMZ. The SPS server itself will reside on our internal network.

Besides the SPS, we have other webservers on our internal network, which also need to be accessible by our customers. We would like that we can ‘integrate’ these other websites in the SharePoint Portal Server website (so that we have a unified layout). To do this, we can use the Page Viewer WebPart. The problem is that, when using the Page Viewer WebPart, our customers’ browsers are redirected to these other webservers, which requires additional Web Publishing rules on our ISA Server 2004.

So far so good. In addition to that we would like to use RADIUS authentication on our ISA Server. The problem is that when doing this, and having RADIUS authentication enabled on all our publishing rules (for each individual website), users are requested to reauthenticate each time they click on a link in SPS that points to another physical webserver (as these are published by another rule in ISA Server).

To solve this problem, we would like to let SPS grab the contents of the other (internal) webservers and publish it (instead of just redirecting the request). This way, we only need 1 Web Publishing rule in our ISA Server (to publish the SPS). Customers’ browser are only sending requests to the SPS server. Customers are not being reauthenticated as there is only one publishing rule in ISA.

We didn’t find how we could set this up in SPS 2003. Please help.

 

[Thomas2000]

Hello,

Not sure if I 100% understand what you are trying to do (I know I can be a bit slow ), but when it comes to grabbing content from other servers (i.e webpages, fileshares etc) you can do that by setting up content indexes or content sources so when you perform a search it will list documents etc from the non-portal servers. But the information is still "physically" located on the other servers.

You can also add listings that points to external (non-portal) sources but yet again that will only be links (listings) that points to the other servers and when clicking a link you will be redirected to that page, file or folder.

As you pointed out using the page viewer webpart you can show information from other servers, but that is also just a kind of linking since you tell the webpart where to fetch information from.

I do not see how you could grab information from other webservers and have that "published" and incorporate in SharePoint without actually making a complete copy of that content and "uploading" it into sharepoint..is that kind of what you want to achieve?

Regards,
Thomas

 

[0ryx]

Hi Thomas, thanks for your reply.

The case you mentioned in the last paragraph is indeed what we want to achieve somehow (if possible!).

So, getting exactly the same result as using the Page Viewer Web Part to publish another website in the portal but then without having the Client being redirected to the other webserver.

A client requests the webpage from SPS. SPS requests certain pages from other webservers and shows them to the client, without redirecting the client to the other webservers.

I don't know if this is possible. If this is impossible then we'll have to redesign our setup. But I started this thread just to know if it possible or not.

Kind regards,
Oryx

 

[Thomas2000]

Hello,

Well I'd like to think "nothing is impossible" but at the moment I do not see a possible way of doing this in SharePoint (but keep in mind, I am not a developer/programmer) so if there is a programatic way of doing this I am not sure.

I would guess that you would have to write a webpart or some sort of other code that will actually retrieve data (content) from other webservers and then somehow update (save) a webpage hosted in SharePoint to display it, and since the content would be different from time to time this would probably have to be dynamic so that an asp or aspx page is updated (created) once a user clicks and wants to view the information. Also might have to be stored in a separate database (since Microsoft probably does not support any alteration of existing content or configuration databases, tables etc.)


Regards,
Thomas