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.
I’ve just built an extranet on Office 365 and SharePoint 2013 Enterprise. Works very well so far and very simple to share the site with no licence related costs or access issues. Everyone just has to have a Microsoft account. It’s for a software company and all its customers use MS extensively so there are no issues. It’s integrated with Yammer for social as well which was an important element for the client. The build was straightforward and all OOTB. Also using the OOTB design for the moment but that works OK for the client. They’re quite happy.
You don’t need a licence to share a site with an external user on a SharePoint online site so it makes perfect sense as an extranet. Once they are allowed in they can have the same SharePoint permissions as anyone else.Â
I’ve in the past extended a 2007 webapp to FBA, and used the authentication formerly known as ADAM (now ADLDS I think).
We initially used a user management solution from codeplex (I forget the name), but it had a number of quirks, so it was replaced with a commercial product, whose name also escapes me.
We fronted it all with Microsoft IAG.
We run a separate farm. It’s in the DMZ. We do however use a shared Management Metadata Service, which was messy and required far too many holes in the firewall!
We currently have SharePoint inside our internal network; external user have to access through the ISA server (DMZ). See diagram:
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Craig – do you run a separate Farm or extend you internal one?
