Companies that are considering Extranets all face a similar set of questions:
- How can we secure this content?
- How can we keep it up to date and relevant in an automated way?
- How do we administer access and track usage?
- Will the Extranet be able to properly showcase our current brand, products, or services?
- How can we make this easy for our internal teams to update?
SharePoint 2007 was the first integrated solution from Microsoft that allowed companies to link their internal documents, policies, and controls with external facing secure websites for authenticated access. The challenge with SharePoint 2007 was always to find a secure and acceptable way to authenticate external users; would they part of a managed Active Directory tree, or would the customer need to setup forms based authentication and store userid/password pairs in SQL Server?
SharePoint 2010 makes the process of Extranet development easier by providing a richer set of tools for external authentication and integration. In addition to security and policy improvements, the branding improvements for SharePoint 2010 allow companies to brand individual extranet sites with their respective customers/partners brand or logo.