SharePoint - across the extranet
It's about time we released details of how to effectively collaborate with people across different companies. Groove is great as a peer to peer file sharing application for point in time projects, but some companies don't want this functionality. Well, there's a beta program starting up which enables you to create a secure extranet between whoever you want to work with. Here's some details from the web about the SharePoint solution Accellerator that Susan has been talking about and has been announced on the SharePoint team blog recently:
The Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint Solution Accelerator will be delivered in phases between now and the first quarter of 2008. It will consist of two primary components:
- A collaboration options guide. This document examines various external collaboration scenarios and provides recommendations for addressing them using Microsoft technologies. This guide will be available by the end of 2007.
- A package of secure external collaboration software and guidance. This package provides most everything you need to create a collaboration solution based on SharePoint technology. This software and guidance will be available in the first quarter of 2008.
You can find this new Solution Accelerator, and all of our other Solution Accelerators here.
There are quite a few benefits too. You can to store and share documents centrally on your server inside the organisation, instead of e-mailing documents to others across the Internet. And instead of giving VPN access to external team members (therefore granting them access to everything on the internal network), you as the site owner can give external members access to just the team collaboration site. It's easy to deploy too. you should be able to deploy this Solution Accelerator in as little as two hours.
The documentation is ready now, with the software phase happening soon. If you're using SharePoint and need to deploy in an Extranet scenario, I'd recommend that you signed up for the beta to make things much easier for you...