Sharepoint Internet Access

One of the most common scenarios for using sharepoint in organizations is accessing sites from internet for remote users.

To do this there are some simple steps which administrators should care about. Most organizations use firewalls to secure LANs. Steps described here are combination of tasks on firewalls and sharepoint central administration.

1- First of all you have to configure firewall to allow incoming traffic on ports 80 for HTTP and 443 for HTTPS on your server.

2- Open Central Administration and click application management section. Then click Create or Extend Web Application.

3- In new opened page click Extend an Existing web application.

4- Select desired web application that you want to extend for access from Internet.

5- Be sure create a new web site has been selected. Type an appropriate description for new IIS web site. It can be something like Internet Access. Type port 80 and enter your domain name or valid IP address in Host Header. Set file path for IIS web site.

After doing these changes URL field value will automatically change to the value you typed in Host Header field.

For final step select Internet from Zone combo box and then click OK.

After passing these steps you decide to use form authentication or remain on windows integrated authentication.

For users outside organization it could be a good idea to use form authentication with ASPNET Membership provider which gives you the ability to seperates Active Directory users from users coming outside organization. (I’ve placed link to form authentication in previous posts.)

You can also enable anonymous access and give users ability to login. Reza Alirezaei has a complete instruction on this.