Sharepoint user security best practices question

Question

I am new to the realm of Sharepoint. I am wondering if there is a best-practice for setting up user accounts for Sharepoint. We will be having employees of our company, as well as clients, sub-contractors, and 3rd parties all sharing documents via Sharepoint.

I am wary of setting up our Sharepoint server on our primary domain because of security concerns. But our primary domain is where all of our user accounts exist. So, either I have to maintain user accounts in two different domains, or I have to allow clients, sub-contractors and 3rd parties to have accounts on our primary domain.

How is this typically managed in real-world scenarios by veteran Sharepoint administrators?

Thanks for your help!

ps - I'd like to tag this with "user-administration" or similar tag, but am unable to because I am a new user.

Answer 1

You dont have to use AD DS with SharePoint. Form based authentication is another option, for example with SqlMemberShip-/SqlRoleProvider.

In SharePoint 2007 you need to either create a seperate site for this, or extend your existing site with a new zone for form based authentication, but in SharePoint 2010 you can run with two different authentications on the same web application.

Externals can then be assigned rights in a SQL database instead of being added to the AD.