How to open a SharePoint 2010 website for Internet access

Organization that has internal portal built on SharePoint solution most often wants to put it to the internet for collaborating with co-workers, partners, customers and suppliers. To achieve this objective the relevant SharePoint web application needs to extend using port, host header name and Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) zones. In SharePoint 2010 there are five different authentication zones for alternate access mapping -Default, Intranet, Extranet, Internet and Custom.

Alternate Access Mapping helps the SharePoint web application to receive the web request from the URL of an external website which is not same to the SharePoint internal website. An external URL generally a company’s registered domain name like Microsoft.com and internal refers to a company’s internal domain name/ server name by which SharePoint receives request.  AAM is also implemented for load balancing between web servers. The following steps refer to the process of extending an internal SharePoint web application for internet access.

Consider: A SharePoint web application is hosted on port 8080, external access URL http://im.mycompanyname.com, and DNS is updated with the SharePoint server IP address.

Steps to follow for extending a SharePoint website to the internet:

1. Go to Central Administration>Application Management>Manage web application; all the web applications are listed here.
2. Select on the web application that you want to extend to the internet (here SharePoint-8080, for example). And then click Extend in the toolbar, extend web application property window will appear.
3. Enter port number that will be used to access this web application (I have used 8082 here), then enter host header this will be the URL to access this web application; here im.mycompanyname.com without http://

create iis website for extended web application

At the bottom of the screen in Public URL section just choose the Internet Zone from the dropdown list.

Now, click Ok to complete the operation. An IIS site will be created with the host header name mentioned above.

1. To make sure you can visit Central Administration>Application management>Configure Alternate Access Mappings. And select the web application that was extended. In the next screen it will shows all the Internal and Public URLs used for this particular web application. Now you can access this web application from Internet using this URL, http://im.mycompanyname.com:8082

alternate access area-verify public url

Hope this helps.

Extending a SharePoint Web Application for Internet Access

Suppose you have configured a web application on port 8080 for internal (intranet) access and now you have a situation where you want to open it to the internet so that user out of your organization can access it from internet.

You can use form based authentication for the internet facing web application to ensure security. Here i am going to extend an web application for accessing it from internet and i will use form based authentication for that web application.

Assume that you have an web application on port 8080 configured with windows or form based authentication.

Steps to follow for extending the web application:

1. Go to Central administration> Manage web application
2. Select your web application(mine is sharepoint 8080 ;for example)
3. Click EXTEND and enter the information for port you want to use, DONT FORGET to enter the host header, otherwise you have to do some extra task. For host header you can put the address that you would like to access this site from internet. For example, if you want to access this site by http://portal.mydomain.com then enter portal.mydomain.com as host header. follow the images below for further.
4. 
5. For Anonymous choose Yes, one thing here you must enable anonymous access of the web application that you are going to put internet.(8080 here)
6. Select authentication method, i chose  windows with default values and Enable form based authentication as well. For form based authentication enter the membership and role provider.
7. 
8. Next, from Public URL section select Internet Zone and click Ok.
9. 
10. System will create the IIS website with the host header you entered. If you are on different port rather that 80 don’t forget to add that port to firewall exception.
11. Now you can browse your site from the internet using the url like http://portal.mydomain.com

12. 

    site visible from internet

13. Now you can configure the new web application for fba access.   Hope this helps.