SharePoint Fest 2017 in Washington

Share​​Point Fest Speaker and Sponsor

April ​17 - 20, 2017

Washington,​ DC

At SharePoint Fest you'll be able to attend technical classes and workshops – taught by Microsoft Certified Trainers, Microsoft engineers, and Microsoft MVPs – covering Enterprise Content Management, Power Users, Social SharePoint, Business Value, Implementation/Administration, Office 365, Workflow, Business Intelligence, Special Topics, and SharePoint Development. There are sessions created for SharePoint administrators, software developers, information architects and knowledge workers which will ensure that you and your team walk away with as much knowledge as you desire to truly leverage SharePoint.

Peter Carson from Envision IT will be delivering two sessions. His first session is on Branding in SharePoint On Premises and Online and the second session is on Extranets in SharePoint On ​Premises and Office 365. Check out the Envision IT ​event page to learn more about the Branding in SharePoint On Premises and Online session​.

Envision IT and Extranet User Manager are also sponsoring the event. Keep an eye out for our Extranet User Manager booth at the conference!

Session - 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 Dropbox, or leverage OneDrive for Business. While both help the problem, they don't provide good governance and can get out of control in larger 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 a 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.