Sharepoint Services Extranet 1

[garyanderson79]

Is it possible to setup sharepoint services as an extranet? If so what is required?

 

[Thomas2000]

Hello,

Yes it is indeed possible, we are running an extranet with WSS.

There are different ways to set it up, but going I would recommend looking at the follwoing pages

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/isa/2004/plan/isawss.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sppt/wss/revproxy.mspx

We are currently re-doing our setup, today we have a single standalone server hosting everything. Since we have deployed our server on a DMZ we can't due to security reasons connect it to a Domain. So we are going to follow the Microsoft recommendations (listed in the articles above).

Basically we will have the following setup:

1 ISA Server deployed on a DMZ zone
1 WSS server deployed on a trusted network and member of our External AD

The WSS server can then connect to our backend SQL cluster which is also on a trusted network.

We are running basic authentication over SSL, so we have also purchased a SSL certificate.

Security is an issue that should be looked into very carefully, so that you are not exposing internal networks/servers to the outside world.

Cheers,
Thomas

 

[tdacquisto]

Hey Thomas,

I looked at the white papers and quite frankly they're WAY beyond my skillset... My head was spinning with all the terminology that I don't understand!

I have no experience with ISA. Does this have to be on a seperate server?

We're a food distributor and I'd like to put a server on our DMZ with WSS on it to develop sites for our vendors to access. I would drop reports onto these sites, etc.

The server would be self contained with WSS and an instance of SQL on it and would be not connected to our domain in any way.

If I'm understanding this correctly, I'd have to make this server have it's own domain and use AD to manage the users, correct?

Thanks for your help.

Tom.

 

[Thomas2000]

Hello,

Sorry for not replying to this sooner, but I have been on a much needed vacation

What you can do is to have your server as a standalone server on your DMZ and manage it by using local user accounts. Just make sure that you are using SSL (HTTPS) since this server will be exposed to the internet. This is how I set up our first extranet solution and it worked just fine. Basically you do not need to put the server in a domain, I used mine in a workgroup and then I created local user accounts for all my users.

Cheers,
Thomas

http://www.thompa.se