The subject of using SharePoint as an Extranet has come up in conversation a few times recently and I was wondering if the community pursue this option in their Farms? We used a very cool Extranet tool called Extradium on SP24, but I know there are other options out there (such as doing your own Forms Based auth). I am really interested to see how you do it? If you do extend SharePoint to your partners do you go for a completely separate Farm running SP Foundation? We also offer a solution to help manage third-party risk so would love to hear your thoughts on that.
Hi Sorin
The client originally used Huddle for storing and sharing documents externally but they wanted something different and they wanted to use Yammer to talk and converse with their customers.
As I said above it’s pretty much OOTB, no change to the design or layout. I have a couple of document libraries for their documents and system files that they share. No versioning as yet. Just a couple of columns to define metadata so I can create filtered views. There are different sections for sales & marketing, IT development, etc. and each of these pages shows the relevant documents and the embedded Yammer group feed from their external network for that section (there are 5 groups on Yammer).
I used this great tabbed web part page on a few pages which presents the document libraries in a great way on a page without using too much space. Filtered views are the business!
http://www.sharepointhillbilly.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=42
There is also a video channel section. I used a free app from the MS store to display videos in a carousel (all videos are hosted on YouTube) so it is simple to do.
There is nothing overly complex in this site at all. It’s all pretty much OOTB SharePoint online (an enterprise account) and linked with Yammer. But it is a vast change from what my client had and so far they are very happy with it (though it has only launched!).
Hope that helps.
It was originally restricted to just 10,000 external users but I think it was early August they removed the restriction..
But can you imagine trying to manage >10,000 external shares?
As a recent beta tester of Beezlinx I can also say that this product has big potential. I created a test one for the Office 365 Community, let me know if you want the url.
Andrew – interesting stuff. So there aren’t any limitations on what external users can do in SP Online and is is really unlimited? Didn’t know that.Â
Andrew
Can you share with us some more details about this extranet ?
It seems to me very interesting.
And anyone uses facebook accounts for auth in a extranet scenario ?
