Enabling collaboration in your SharePoint Extranet (i.e. collaboration with individuals outside your organization) poses unique challenges for SharePoint server administrators.  These challenges translate directly into key questions for the administrator such as:

How can I provide SharePoint sites for our employees to use to collaborate with our customers, suppliers, partners, etc. and be assured that proper security is maintained?

How can I keep user accounts and passwords for non-employees in a separate database from our internal network user accounts and passwords?

How can I delegate user account creation and maintenance of extranet user accounts to trusted individuals and still maintain proper security and control?

How can SharePoint Extranet users perform their own password changes?

How can I define and gather custom user profile data from my SharePoint Extranet site's users?

How can I automate and manage the process of user site requests and site provisioning?

Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2007 is designed specifically to help the SharePoint server administrator overcome these challenges and deploy SharePoint’s leading-edge collaboration tools to the extranet in a secure manner.  Continue reading to examine how:

1. Extranet Collaboration Manager fully leverages the new capabilities in SharePoint 2007 to provide you with options for deciding how users will login to your SharePoint Extranet sites and how their user information is stored.

2. ExCM also provides management interfaces which let you control the workflows and changes of your SharePoint Extranet environment as new sites are requested, created, and used for collaboration.

3. With ExCM, monitoring and auditing of site creation workflows and user management activities is possible through reports and list views.

4. Extranet Collaboration Manager comes in two versions - Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition.

1. ExCM - Standard Edition provides you with a suite of tools to Simplify SharePoint Extranet user access and management.  See the fact sheet below for more details.

2. ExCM - Enterprise Edition allows your users to submit a request when he or she would like to have a new SharePoint 2007 site provisioned.  You can easily associate custom workflows with the new site requests, asking for approval prior to site creation.  Once a site request is approved, ExCM - EE will automatically provision the site for you using any SharePoint 2007 site definition you have specified.

Fact Sheet: Extranet Collaboration Manager - Standard Edition ExCM - SE provides you with A Suite of tools to Simplify SharePoint Extranet user access and management Extranet Collaboration Manager provides a comprehensive set of features that enable a wide variety of organizations to take collaboration in their SharePoint Extranet to the next level. This fact sheet contains a summary of ExCM - Standard Edition features.  Provide user management capabilities to delegated administrators A Delegated Administrator is a site user that has been given the additional ability to manage users for a SharePoint Extranet site using Extranet Collaboration Manager's delegation components. Delegated Administrators can perform user management tasks such as inviting new users, unlocking user accounts and resetting user passwords.  Also, you can optionally allow Delegated Administrators to explicitly add or delete users. Typically, a Delegated Administrator only has the rights to edit a sub-set of site users as defined by his or her 'Scope of Administration'. The 'Scope of Administration' for a Delegated Administrator is defined by a site administrator and depends on the Delegation Type configured for the site. A Delegated Administrator does not typically have privileged administrative access to the SharePoint 2007 site.      Allow SharePoint Extranet Site access through user self-registration or by invitation only Uninvited registrations allow anonymous users to self-register for access to your SharePoint Extranet site. When an uninvited registration is completed, the new user is added to the 'Uninvited Registration Group' as defined in the Delegation Settings page. Invited registrations allow a Site Administrator or a Delegated Administrator to invite users to the site. When a new invitation is created, permissions for the new user are defined by, but may not exceed the permissions of the user sending the invitation. A customizable e-mail will be sent to the registration invitee containing a registration link and directions describing the registration process. Invitations expire if not completed within three days. As a point of extensibility, you also have the opportunity to define a custom registration process. This allows an organization to integrate custom, typically more advanced registration scenarios into the solution.  Gather Custom data when invited or uninvited users register for access to your SharePoint Extranet site Before either invited or uninvited users may access your SharePoint Extranet site, they must first visit a user registration page and provide a username, password, and password recovery question.  Uninvited users must also provide their e-mail address on the registration page (an invited user's e-mail address is already known). As a point of extensibility, you can define additional data fields for a user to fill-in when he or she registers for site access.  These additional fields can be either required or optional for the user to complete.  As an example, you may want to ask a new user to provide his or her company name and phone number.  Allow site users to change their own passwords   When a user is logged into your SharePoint Extranet site with ExCM - SE's delegation components enabled, he or she will be presented with a "Change My Password" personal action from the Welcome menu.   This feature can optionally be configured on or off.  Keep track of all user management activity with auditing All ExCM - SE user management related activities that occur within your site are logged for auditing purposes.  Logged activities include user creation, invitation and deletion as well as password resets and changes.  gather Detailed user Profile Data From Site Users When ExCM - SE's user profile management is enabled, your SharePoint Extranet site's users can be allowed to view and update their own detailed user profile data.  Registration Approval Process Define a list of approvers to review invited and/or anonymous registrations. When a user registers the account will remain unapproved until reviewed by an approver. One or more approvers will be notified of the pending registration. After reviewing the account the approver can approve or deny the request. The registering user will then be notified of the approval status.  Pre-Approved Domain Names A list of pre-approved domain names can be defined. When a user registers for access to the site, his or her account will automatically be approved if the registering domain names exists in the pre-approved domain name list.  Account Verification When a anonymous user registers for site access, a message will be sent to the user's e-mail address asking the user to verify the account. The user can access the site only after verification.  User Automation Job Enforces Password Expiration and Activity Expiration ExCM now contains a list of STSADM commands which can be use to create and manage user automation operations such as password expiration and account activity expiration. The job will notify users of pending expirations via e-mail. If a corrective action is not taken the account will be locked out. The age of the lockout and the notification window are customizable using STSADM. You can also customize the notification messages for each event.

If you are planning to or already have implemented SharePoint 2007 for your extranet, you are facing the challenging process of using scarce IT resources to get collaborative extranet sites provisioned and accessible. Once online, the ongoing tasks for user management of these collaborative applications will have to be identified and assigned. Out-of-the box, SharePoint 2007 provides many of the raw capabilities necessary for extranet collaboration, but is missing critical tools that SharePoint administrators need to establish, maintain and monitor the collaboration environment.

Extranet Collaboration Manager by SharePoint Solutions is a complete solution that will:

• Simplify the provisioning and maintenance of external resources for use with your business partners
• Enable you to automate site provisioning requests through workflows
• Delegate user management tasks to your business partners
• Provide you with the capability to audit the provisioning and user maintenance activities within your collaborative
  environment.

Companies in a wide range of industries are accelerating their business with the help of effective external collaboration.  Open new doors with your business partners and reduce the cost of managing your SharePoint Extranet.