I am working on a MOSS 2007 in an extranet as well as intranet deployment. For business reasons, they have been kept separate - till now.
The requirement now is - the intranet needs to be able to publish and fetch data from the extranet. The intranet needs to push data to a list on the extranet (it is a custom built survey) and this link will be blasted via email to general public as well as put up on the homepage of the org for users to respond. The list is configured in an anonymous mode. The survey results however need to be posted to the intranet where someone can take a look at the data, run analytics etc. on it.
Q1. Since the extranet is beyond the internal firewall - how will the survey data be published to the intranet? Is there a supported mechanism in MOSS for this? I don't want to suggest exposing the intranet's webservices to do this.
Q2. If I expose the internal webservices, are there any safeguards that MOSS provides me with - or do I need to undergo a complete "webapp" security evaluation?
Q3. Would it be better to change the extranet to a publishing portal setup? However, I am unclear as to how will the data be synced with the intranet deployment. The intranet users don't want to manage two accounts on two distinct environments.
This question seems to be a mix of serverfault & stackoverflow - however, I am looking for an answer to the programming question - how should the sync be designed with least impact on the existing setup.