Registration Methods

An outward- facing web site can either create its own user accounts or rely on a third party such as the Microsoft Passport service to provide authentication services (see Chapter 6). The most common scenario is to have users register and provide their own username and password for use on the portal. This approach is described in detail later in this chapter. A large number of users will remain anonymous for a public web site and therefore never register.

An intranet begins with a set of known users who already have accounts. If these accounts are mapped to the enterprise portal to enable single sign-on, the starting place for the profile already exists in Active Directory. You can tap into that information so users do not have to enter their name , phone number, or other contact information twice. SharePoint Portal Server allows you to add a group of users from Active Directory en masse rather than create each account individually. In this enterprise portal scenario, there are no anonymous users, and in many cases all users belong to the same domain.

An extranet could start with either of these approaches. You could treat the extranet portal as an independent entity and have members of your organization maintain accounts on the portal separate from their network accounts. This approach makes sense, especially when the extranet is open to a broader group of users such as suppliers, vendors , and customers who constitute the bulk of the user population. By keeping the systems separate, you eliminate security vulnerabilities that might arise from sharing authentication information. If the internal users outnumber those on the outside, you might want to take the intranet approach, adding accounts for the additional users and providing access to the system through network firewalls.