Choosing the most appropriate solution

Question

I hope you guys can help as I'm new to Sharepoint development and it appears to have a million and one ways to achieve any goal!

I need to provide our staff a place on the intranet to enter product documentation (wiki?), where they can write about a particular component, relate it to other components (used a lookup column pointing to dependencies in the same list), relate it to which products it applies (lookup to a product list) and indicate whether it is for public consumption (yes/no).

If it is to be for public consumption, its content should appear on a non-authenticated, public facing site and it also needs some navigation options produced from the lookup data, i.e. hierarchical tree views.

I have tried to achieve this with Foundation but it appears too lacking in features, i.e. I had two separate web applications set up, one for the intranet and another for the public but sharing data wasn't possible using stored authentication. Also, the lack of templating makes navigation options difficult.

Note that I am primarily a developer so code options are not a problem, if less desirable as changes will require dev time.

What would be the best way to:

1) Share the public data with the public, while retaining it and the rest under the auth'd site for editing

2) Enable templated views of the wiki data, to allow the nav to display

3) Alter the content of web parts on a page, i.e. have a web part that displays just the dependencies of the component being viewed

I believe I've answered 2 - Office 365 Enterprise Wiki but still awaiting go-ahead on that but it would be great to have a page that displays a web part to the left with a nav menu, then clicking it changes web parts on the right to display content, dependencies, etc.

Any solutions gratefully received!

Answer 1

+1 to SPDoctor's comment, it's a lot of questions for a single post! I'll just reply to 1/

I have the same issue. The easy answer is to use a Page Viewer Web Part (aka iframe) to display a view of your intranet on your public site. Of course it means that you need to enable anonymous access on your intranet, at least for the items you want to make public.

If this doesn't work for you, then you'll have to create two lists, one intranet and one public, and keep them in sync. There is no out of the box option for this, so you'll need to write your own code (for example using Web Services), or have a semi-manual process (through Excel, Access or SharePoint workspace dfor example).

If you just need to push new items to the public site, consider using inbound e-mail.