Extranet Best Practices?

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Matthew McBride
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This topic may be outside the scope of this forum, but maybe not... 

We are configuring our first extranet server (with ExCM) and making good progress... but we
were wondering what policy others are adopting at the Site Collection level for
new extranet sites? For example, for new extranet sites that are separate and
unrelated, are you creating new Sites under one parent Site Collection, or do
you create a new Site Collection for each new extranet site?

Also, if anyone knows of a good white paper on this issue it would be greatly
appreciated!


David Smith
Texas A&M University

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2 Comments

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  • 0
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    Matthew McBride

    In my experience I feel most folks lean toward separate Site Collections for unrelated sites. The main reasons for this are...

    1. This creates a security boundary. This especially important if a user in site collection A should never see content in site collection B. If your sub-sites are in the same site collection is may be too easy to accidentally grant permission to restricted content.
    2. SharePoint Service Pack 1 provide some additional STSADM commands that can be used to limit the people picker results to users who have access to a single site collection. This is important if you don't want users in site collection A to see user in site collection B from any of the people pickers.
    3. Site collections can be placed in separated DBs and may provide easier backup and recovery.
    4. Site collections separate quotas applied to limit growth. Using separate site collections allows you to use different quotas for different site collection usages.

    Some of the reasons for not using separate site collections are...

    1. Site collection can only be created using Central Administration. See our Site Provisioning Assistant application (also included in ExCM Enterprise Edition) to create site collections from the content site.
    2. Security trimmed navigation from a common home page. SharePoint can display sub-sites which the users have access to in the top and side nav bars.
    Jeremy Luerkens
    Manager, Software Production
    SharePoint Solutions
  • 0
    Avatar
    Matthew McBride

    Thank you for your reply, it was very helpful. I have another question in the same area of best practices:

    • Does each Site Collection need to have it's own folder of login/registration pages (Register.aspx, RegistrationSuccess.aspx, ChangeMyPassword.aspx, ChangeMyQuestion.aspx, MangProfile.aspx) or do they all need to point to the pages used by the root Site Collection?
      • I see the option to 'define custom navigation locations' on the Delegation Settings page, but I'm not sure how these settings are intended to be used.
      • When i'm testing the login page for a child Site Collection site (trying to register as an anonymous user) I can't access the Registration page from the login page unless the root Site Collection has 'Allow Anonymous Registration' set to 'yes' even though the child Site Collection has it set to 'yes' already - I get an error message that anonymous registration is not allowed
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