Connecting to SharePoint services from external domain

pwd

Should it be possible to connect to SharePoint services from an external domain generally, or is a network likely to be configured to prevent this?

If it should be possible, do you need to configure SharePoint to accept calls to the services from an external domain? (either specifically, or external in general)

Thanks

stevenmu

If you can use it, SharePoint 2010 will support standards based claims authentication, this would allow you setup a connection for the external domain and then the external domain managers could manage their users themselves.

I presume though you're using WSS 3.0 ? In that case there's a number of routes you could take.

If you want users on the external domain to authenticate using their external domain credential, then there will need to be a trust established between the domains. Once that's in place SharePoint will treat them the same as existing domain users. That would be typical for an organisation with different offices and different local domains in each.

If the external domain is outside your organisation, you naturally won't want to be configuring trusts with it. In that case you can configure SharePoint to use forms based authentication (FBA). External users will be sent to a login page to enter their username/password. Forms based authentication can authenticate users against your domain, so you could create domain users for the external users, or better yet it can authenticate against users held in a membership database (this is actually built on the standard asp.net user/membership providers if you're familiar with that).

You can read a little more about configuring FBA here. In your case though I presume you want the external users to access the same sites and content as the internal user? In that case instead of creating a new web application you will extend your existing web application, this in effect creates a second web application using the same content/sites as the original application, you will then configure this with FBA. Then your internal users will connect using the original application with the original URL and be authenticated with windows authentication, your external users will connect to the new application with the new URL and be authenticated via FBA.

Edit: if you are going with FBA and database membership the Community Kit for Sharepoint (http://cks.codeplex.com/) has a useful FBA module which helps with managing users and stuff.

pwd

Thanks
I think using a wcf proxy to connect, using a login for the external application, would be best for the specific situation.