Coming up with a topology for a public facing SharePoint website

Question

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!

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.