Have you ever made your intranet available externally (extranet)?

steinooo

steinooo

steinooo

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Hi all,

Just wondered if anyone had any exposure to making any part of a Sharepoint intranet available to people on the web?

thanks
 
I wouldn't suggest it, we use Sharepoint on a very large scale, it would just compromise the security of your system.

Im sure you know how un-stable sharepoint is and giving the the external collaboration kit wont help it one bit.
 
Good point it would be a security risk, and yes Sharepoint is a strange beast, I can imagine the extranet stuff would be tricky!

Thanks for the comments

I wonder if Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 can do what I need?
 
Not sharepoint but I have made parts of a corporate intranet external with the use of Apache and reverse proxy.

As Jaket as said, would never want to do it on sharepoint. Big enough of a beast as it is :D
 
I suppose it depends how many people you want to give access to it, what sort of people they are etc, but maybe you could publish an IE session through Citrix/RDP?

I know its not technically the best or cleanest way, but may be an option...
 
I found the easiest (not the cheapest mind) way of doing is by setting up a citrix server and csg and then sharing out IE via citrix, thus giving access to your sharepoint.

If you budget wont push to citrix, ericom is a very cheap alternative.

Failing that may some kind of RSA authentication?
 
Windows 2008 TS gateway and app publishing will do the same thing

If you're after 2 factor auth on a budget, look at Deepnet security - its superb, very cheap and a lot simpler to administer and set up than RSA
 
iaind said:
Windows 2008 TS gateway and app publishing will do the same thing

If you're after 2 factor auth on a budget, look at Deepnet security - its superb, very cheap and a lot simpler to administer and set up than RSA
Click to expand...

wow, completely forgot about app publishing in 2008, thanks very much. I'll look into that tomorrow.
 
Just remember to set it up so they cant browse externally.

We did something similar and found people didnt realise it was a remote app and when they were finished on the intranet, they carried on browsing with it...
 
Our intranet is accessed via the internet as I/we use it for our job system and various important files, works very well.
 
iaind said:
Just remember to set it up so they cant browse externally.

We did something similar and found people didnt realise it was a remote app and when they were finished on the intranet, they carried on browsing with it...
Click to expand...

good point thanks, have you faced any extra hacking attempts since opening this up?
 
Hi There,

We use Sharepoint as a client facing extranet as well as for our internal staff, we simply use FBA to cater for the external users in order to keep them out of our AD.

Personally as long as the security is there I see no reason not to open up sections on sharepoint for clients to use. Afterall the ability was bundled in with sharepoint, why not use it?
 
Id say the least complicated method would be to present sharepoint out with ISA as in the last post, get an SSL cert installed on the listener. Disable unencrypted http access, configure authentication (remember its SSL so basic is an option, since the SSL tunnel will be negotiated before the credentials are passed) and set ISA to pass the credentials back to the internal sharepoint site

Using the ISA you can also restrict the rule to a limited group of people, so if you have execs that should have it externally and canteen staff that shouldnt, then you can limit who is permitted access from the outside while allowing everyone access internally
 
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