This has somewhat being answered here, but it's very outdated and the links given do not apply, at least the 2nd link.
We have a full license for Office 365 Sharepoint and I want to be able to create a web-part (Page-Viewer) to place an internal hosted website in an iframe.
For some reason the web-part has greyed-out the Zone and I cannot change it to Left or anything else. Why?
Is it possible to allow external users to access our Intranet and internal websites via Sharepoint and how please?
Another one of those, "I should have looked further", for the answer!
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/turn-external-sharing-on-or-off-for-sharepoint-online-6288296a-b6b7-4ea4-b4ed-c297bf833e30
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/manage-external-sharing-for-your-sharepoint-online-environment-c8a462eb-0723-4b0b-8d0a-70feafe4be85
The features are there and available on Office365 to turn ON or OFF sharing of internal areas to external users. However, it is risky, not knowing really who's watching over the shoulders of people.
Related
I'm attempting (futilely) to create a custom advanced search page for my department's SharePoint site. I've been using this article as a guide,
http://tqclarkson.com/2007/10/26/creating-a-custom-advanced-search-box-in-moss-2007/
I've had some success copying the code of the advanced search web part and modifying it to my needs. However, I'm having some struggles with scopes.
Some background...
We are currently running MOSS 2007
Our company houses all its intranet sites under one GIGANTIC site collection
I am a site owner, but not the site collection administrator (that is controlled by IT corporate). Therefore I don't have access to central administration which houses most of the search settings.
IT has not set up any custom scopes (and just trust me when I say asking them to do so would be completely impractical).
I need to scope the advanced search web part's queries to just our site or its libraries. In a perfect world, I would just create custom scopes for this purpose, but as I mentioned that's not an option here.
I've tried using the URL property to restrict the results. Problem is the search has to be executed on EVERY RECORD in the database (which I'm sure is unfathomably huge). I did a test query which took over 5 minutes to result! Definitely not a practical solution.
So that's where I'm stuck. I need to scope the queries but can't figure out how else to do it. Any advice is welcome. Thanks as always!
We're planning to use Sharepoint 2010 as a CMS for a website we're building. This site will also have login functionality; and my boss suggested we use Sharepoint's user profile features to store user info (username, password, contact info, etc.) for the site. How is this better then say using a standard list or a database table somewhere? I'm looking into how this could possibly work; but has anyone here tried something similar? Any anecdotes about it you could share? Any constructive input is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Frank
You asked for anecdotes. I have an anecdote.
A while back, I was trying to set up a Sharepoint server that exposed users' personal pages to the Internet at large. We wanted to allow authenticated access, but not to require it; that is to say, normal users would have read-only access and additionally the ability to submit InfoPath form data to Sharepoint libraries created to receive the results. The users could thus post public information and create public surveys using Infopath web forms.
When I went to make access public, I ran into a few problems. The "unauthenticated users" option on the preferences page of the document library was greyed out, even when I was logged in with a super-admin account.
In the end, I had to do a little bit of URL hacking to make this work. I had to change "DOC" to "DOCLIST" in the URL I used to access the preferences page (not that exactly, but something like that) and then the "everyone" option became available. In other words, there was actually no official way to do what I was trying to do.
The whole thing left a really sour taste in my mouth about Sharepoint for Internet-facing sites. See also things like this. Sharepoint is really designed for Intranet use only. As an additional downside, it is much more resource-hungry than normal CMSen. A full Sharepoint install can, without a single user, choke a pretty powerful virtual machine. I can't comment on its scalability as I've never done a really large rollout, but I can say that the indexing service is pretty heavy on the CPU.
Seems to me that LDAP would be a better way to store information on users; if you're using Sharepoint, you've probably already got an AD infrastructure. AD stores user profile info in LDAP anyhow - what you see in "Active Directory Users and Computers" is just a glorified LDAP browser.
Here is my initial toughts:
PRO: It's "easy" to merge infomation from outer sources like your AD, to be stored with the "other" user information in order to be displayed using the same means.
CON: I haven't come across a FBA Membership provider for User Profile Store.
I am building a publicly facing website that does the following.
Users log in.
And then view a list of their customers.
They click on a customer to view their past purchases, order them, change them etc.
This is not a shopping site by the way.
It is a simple look up tool.
Note that none of the data accessed by the website is in anything other than a SQL database - no office documents. Also, the login does not use users Windows credentials on a VPN or something like that.
Typically I would build this using a standard ASP.NET MVC website.
However the client says they want to use Sharepoint.
As I understand it, Sharepoint is used for workflow and websites that are collaboration tools such as the components you can see here http://www.sharepointhosting.com/sharepoint-features.html
Here are my questions:
Would I be right in saying that WSS is completely inappropriate for this task as it comes with an overhead that provides no benefits?
If I had to use it, would I need WSS or MOSS?
If I had to use it, would I be right in saying the site would consist of :
List item
a) Web Parts
b) And a custom site layout. How do I create one of these?
Addendum:The book Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development looks like a good start
1.) I agree that SharePoint would be quite inappropriate for this task. A few reasons:
It costs thousands of dollars to license SharePoint for use on the open Internet
SharePoint will use a lot of resources (SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory...) that are unnecessarily demanding for your task
SP will give you very little flexibility to develop a solution in your way -- it sounds like you would need to create a database-connected Web Part in ASP.NET anyway (so that could be entirely independent of SP)
SharePoint has it's place--it can be remarkably helpful as a company's internal document management, intranet, and workflow/approval system--but it is not well suited for custom code nor Internet use.
2.) I believe MOSS would be required for the Internet license (as in the link above).
3.) SP development is not like typical relation database systems (for example, it uses flat, unnormalized tables). If your SQL matched the SharePoint way of thinking, you might be able to connect to your database as an external List using SharePoint Designer. More likely you would need to use Visual Studio to create a custom Web Part in ASP.NET.
Hopefully this'll be a few reasonable arguments you can use to help the customer see how SharePoint is inappropriate for the task... In fact, I expect just the first point (the cost of licensing) will turn them.
You can technically use WSS for this task but MOSS has more features aimed at building public facing websites. The publishing infrastructure comes to mind. It has has the CQWP which enables you to build custom interfaces which perform well in SharePoint. With SharePoint there are potentially challenges around scalability. If you know the platform well then doing something like what you have suggested would be a pretty quick task. If you don't know SharePoint and the underlying system well you could face challenges.
You do not want to approach building the final application with SharePoint Designer. It has behavior which can cause major problems with scalability. You want to create a SharePoint Solution comprising a number of features which can be easily deployed to SharePoint. Going this route does not alleviate performance problems but you are going to be closer to the right solution. You can package up the custom user interface elements as CQWPs or write Web Parts. I personally prefer to write Web Parts.
You do the overall site design in a Master Page. Pages within a site are then inheriting from this. If you have MOSS then you can create what are called publishing pages which contain your Web Parts. These are not available in WSS which is why people recommend against it for public websites.
To decide whether SharePoint (any version) is worth it, you need to find out if they are going to use any of the core features. If everything is going to be custom and you are not going to make use of any workflow or document management features in your deployment then I would stay away. To see whether you want to go further with SharePoint from a development perspective, take a look at the WSS developer labs. I recently ran an intro course at my employer using the materials from that site. They are dated, and need more info on best practices but they provide a quick way for you to dip a toe in the water and decide whether you want to go any further.
1) For the core functionality as you describe it SharePoint isn't going to add anything, BUT if you build it on SharePoints premisses it allows your client to add a lot of functionality outside the core for "free" like:
They can add Content Editor WebParts to pages where they can add descriptions, and messages
They can add lists where the customers can enter requests/comments/... and automatically have new entries mailed to anyone in the organisation subscribing to changes
The functionality you develop can be reused on their intranet
Any future small "web apps" can be included in the same site
...
So all in all unless you have a better framework to use then use SharePoint
2) WSS is all you need for now
3) Your main deliverable for now would be:
a feature with some Site Pages and a few Web Parts
a feature with a custom masterpage and corresponding css
True. Well not inappropriate but it doesn't add anything either.. but maybe in the future?
WSS is enough
You'd need web parts to expose your data, yes. The custom site layout is not necessary. If you want your own look and feel a SharePoint Theme may suffice. Even if you want some real custom layout tweaks you probably don't need a site template but you can get away with using just SharePoint Designer to edit the pages or master page.
I want to use a CMS that can be accessed by my clients via the internet. All SharePoint usage I have seen is for intranet sites only. What I am looking to do:
Landing page for all clients, with general information.
Client login to client specific portal page with client specific information.
Accessible via the internet. The clients may or may not have SharePoint.
General and client specific wikis.
I won't be hosting this myself. I would be looking for a hosting provider as well.
I am also looking at using DotNetNuke, which has a lower cost of entry. I am open to suggestions of other CMSs, but my skills are built around C# and ASP.NET.
Before going down the SharePoint path, I wanted to make sure these things are possible.
Thanks!
Update:
Thanks to all that have given me some points to ponder. In summary, here is what I have decided to do (given my current skill set):
SharePoint can be used for my needs (my initial question). Many great example sites.
DotNetNuke as my CMS. I realize other good CMSs are available, but I prefer to stick to the Microsoft stack.
Branding will be easier in DotNetNuke.
The site will not be very big and not used by many. SharePoint will be overkill at this point.
Many of the 'modules' I am looking to use (wiki, forum, ...) seem to have more options/maturity using DotNetNuke.
Biggest Deciding Factor
Integrating a CMS solution with my software product and then installing/implementing this solution for individual clients will have a much larger cost with SharePoint. DotNetNuke will allow me to 'leave behind' the solution with the client without having them to invest heavily in SharePoint if they do not already own it.
Thanks to all!
Ed
Everything you require is supported by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, which is included at no additional cost with a Windows Server license. However, SharePoint does have an administrative and development overhead that you could avoid using a different platform. It doesn't sound like you would really be leveraging any of SharePoint's particular strengths (document management, Office client integration, ad hoc collaboration sites, etc), so it's probably not worth the extra effort.
So in short, the answer to your question is "Yes", but it's probably not your best option with these specific requirements.
Check out the Top 17 case studies for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and several new MOSS-based web sites. There are some nice Internet websites too.
there are heaps of SharePoint sites out there facing the internet. There’s a great list of over 1,000 of them on the WSS Demo site here: http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/websites.aspx
All of the requirements you’ve listed are achievable with the externally facing SharePoint model. There’s an obvious cost impact of going down the SharePoint path versus DotNetNuke but it’s certainly achievable in terms of functionality.
Kentico offers SharePoint Connector which allows to publish SharePoint content to external sites: http://www.kentico.com/cms-asp-net-features/sharepoint.aspx
All the things you mentioned are possible. Note that hosting a SharePoint server can be expensive. Most hosting providers charge you a dedicated server hosting plan.
Also I'm not impressed with the default wiki solution in SharePoint. You might want to consider a 3th party wiki tool and point your SharePoint Search towards it so that the results are shown in your search results. Drawback is that you loose the security trimming.
You might also be interested in the BPOS solution. A (kind of) hosting service for SharePoint that Microsoft is offering.
I'm currently planning the migration of a Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) website to a SharePoint 2007 publishing site.
The top-level site is a public facing, anonymously-accessible website. It will contain two areas which need to be protected with forms-based authentication - each of which will have a distinct set of users.
There is content in the current MCMS site which uses "Connected Postings", which is the ability to use content in multiple places without duplicating it. In SharePoint, a similar concept is supported via the Reusable Content list, but this doesn't span site collections.
I'm thinking that this should be a single web application with three site collections. 1 for the public facing site, and the others for the two protected areas. However, I'm not sure if 1 site collection can be anonymous, with the other 2 implementing different FBA authentication providers.
I'd like my Urls to be something like:
www.whatever.com
www.whatever.com/protectedarea1
www.whatever.com/protectedarea2
Without Url rewriting, this would be difficult to do with separate web applications.
If I end up having to go with 3 separate web applications in order to get authentication to work as desired, I will probably have to get creative with content deployment so as not to duplicate content during authoring.
Would appreciate any thoughts, thank you!
Don't do MCMS so cannot answer specific to that, see http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/ for alot of info.
Microsoft has a bunch of different designs for extranets, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263513.aspx depending on your needs. You can set it up as you are describing, forms are a little weak put their is some a better version available on CodePlex.
For the URLS, Sharepoint has a feature called "Manged Paths" that will do what you want. No URL rewriting needed.
Our setup is a site collection for extranet and internal, where most work is done. When finished they can publish it(does make an extra copy) to the public site. Some public sites are publish only sites where they have no interaction with non-account people, some are sites were they actually do most of their work and non-account people can make contributions. All are available under MOSS.
Thanks, that extranet link will be helpful when looking at separating the authoring environment from the publishing environment.
I was trying to implement two FBA membership providers on two site collections within the same web application. Doesn't look like I can do that, gonna try using the same membership provider with different roles.