Intranet to Extranet Conversion

Question

We have an SharePoint 2007 Intranet portal for the organization and are looking to make it a SharePoint 2007 extranet portal. Users are authenticated from Active Directory in the current system.

We are making arrangements to access Active Directory from the extranet and also for Secure Socket Layers (SSL).

Has anybody done this kind of work? Please provide some guidelines, what needs to be considered for completing this task successfully.

The architecture of the farm is not the same for every organization but would love to see what things need to be focused on.

Answer 1

Please take a look at TMG formerly ISA. You will need to provide the ability for the external users to register etc. Take a look at SharePoint External Collaboration Manager very inexpensive product by SharePoint solutions (I don't work for them). It takes care of New User Registration, Forgot Password etc.

You might want to create 2 different zones of the same web application, these 2 different zones will use two different authentication store. Also configure TGM (ISA) so it will manage routing users to the correct zone based on their origin (logged into to the internal network or coming from outside).

Final thoughts, you might want to upgrade to 2010 before doing anything with external collaboration. It will be a pain to upgrade later. Also 2010's claims bases auth provides more support for external collaboration.

You might want to consider a dedicated farm for external collaboration instead of opening up your Intranet. If users are not careful there is a risk of opening up sensitive information to external users.