Allow partner users to authenticate and allow access to our companys intranet application

Question

We have a sales company and we have an AD forest, contoso.com, for example. In this forest, we deployed a SharePoint Server 2013 farm in the contoso.com domain, and we have 2 partner companies that we need to enable access to web applications that are mostly on the intranet in SharePoint 2013 farm.

I have no idea how to work with ADFS and claims authentication. For a starting point, can anybody guide how to achieve the above scenario?

1. We have one intranet web application

2. Our company has ADFS infrastructure

   • How do we configure ADFS to issue claims for our intranet?
   • How do we create an authentication provider?
   • How do we grant a partner company's users access to our intranet?

Answer 1

Using ADFS is not for the fainthearted, so you would really benefit from taking some ADFS training. That said, Microsoft has a (fairly long) Technet page on how to wire up SharePoint 2013 with ADFS but bear in mind that you'd have to set up a trust with your 2 partners' Active Directories if you really want to benefit from ADFS features (i.e. Single Sign On from each partner's AD).

If you don't want or can't set up those trusts with your partners' ADs and will create dedicated accounts for your partners in your own AD, note that there are other packaged solutions leveraging other forms of authentication with SharePoint available.

We hope this helps!