SharePoint Fest 2017 in Denver

Peter Carson Speaking at SharePoint Fest Denver

​May 31 - June 1, 2017
Denver, Colorado

At SharePoint ​Fest Denver, participants attend technical classes and workshops –​ taught by Microsoft Certified Trainers, Microsoft engineers and Micr​osoft MVPs – covering Enterprise Content Management, Power Users, Social SharePoint, Business Value, Implementation/Administration, Office 365, Workflow, Business Intelligence, Special Topics & SharePoint Development. Attendees can select tracks based on their roles and what content best meets their current needs.

Peter Carson, President of Envision IT will be delivering two sessions. His first session is on Extranets in SharePoint On Premises and Office 365. ​The second session is on Running Effective Projects in Office 365​. Learn more about this session at the Envision​ IT site.

Extranet User Manager is a sponsor at this event, so stop by our booth and meet us in person.

Session Overview - Extranets in SharePoint On Premises and Office 365

SharePoint is a great tool for collaborating, whether you use the on premise versions or Office 365. In most organizations, collaboration includes not only internal users, but external ones as well. An Extranet is an ideal way to facilitate this. In this session we’ll go over what an Extranet is and why you would want one, and then discuss the various options for delivering one.

Traditionally many people rely on email for document collaboration externally. This can quickly become unmanageable, particularly as the number of participants and documents grow. Really, anything more than two people collaborating breaks down over email. Next steps for many are to fire up shadow IT such as Drop​box, or leverage OneDrive for Business. While both help the problem, they don’t provide good governance and can get out control in organizations.

Extranets help solve this problem. They can take many forms. The idea of a single version of the truth is core to collaboration in general, and SharePoint is a great way to provide this. Whether it is an on premises installation of SharePoint 2016, 2013, or 2010, or in the cloud in SharePoint Online / Office 365, a rich collaboration environment can be created.

In the on premises scenarios, there are many choices to be answered. How is SharePoint going to be exposed externally? Is there a DMZ in place already that can be used to secure it, a reverse proxy to publish the internal farm, or aa hybrid approach such as Azure Application Proxy to provide connectivity through the cloud to on premises. Then there is the access question. Will user accounts be created in the on premises AD (not recommended), a DMZ AD, or another repository like SQL? How will users get their passwords, sign in, and reset forgotten passwords? Should federation be used with partners?

From an infrastructure perspective, building an Extranet in the cloud is much easier. SharePoint Online supports external users in a number of ways. External sharing can be done directly through SharePoint, or the new preview Azure B2B service can be used to federate to partners. From a governance perspective how is this managed? Who invites users, or can they self-register, and if so who approves their accounts?

What customization is desired over the whole experience? Can the new beta REST invitation in Azure B2B be used to better control this?

Come learn not only the designs and patterns for delivering an Extranet, but see examples of many different Extranet implementations, both in the cloud and on premises, as part of this talk.