There’s lots of information online about setting up extranets in SharePoint 2010, but there’s not so much information on how to actually manage your forms based user accounts once the extranet is provisioned.  Most documentation tells you to manage user accounts in IIS or with a membership seeder tool, both of which require admins to manage everything and have bare-bones interfaces.  Luckily, the SharePoint FBA open-source pack, which was fabulous for SharePoint 2007 extranets, has finally been ported to 2010.  This tool gives you a web page in central admin where admins can manage all of their user accounts and reset passwords, as well as web parts for users to manage their account themselves–such as password changes and password requests.

Password Change Web Part

My initial impression of these tools are that they are fabulous, and make extranet administration much more friendly, just as they did in 2007.  This also saves us from having to buy an expensive third-party tool or develop something custom, in order to let users change their own passwords.

You can download the SharePoint 2010 FBA pack here:

http://sharepoint2010fba.codeplex.com/releases/view/65194

Installation is as simple as installing a WSP package, as long as your extranet site is already provisioned.  I discussed setting up an extranet site for Microsoft Project Server in a separate blog post here:

http://blogs.kraftkennedy.com/index.php/2011/03/04/building-a-project-server-2010-extranet-in-sharepoint-2010/#more-1830

I also referenced the 2007 version of this product in a blog post a few years ago:

http://blogs.kraftkennedy.com/index.php/2010/01/24/useful-free-web-parts-for-sharepoint-part-2/

The first step in building a Project Server 2010 extranet is to build a SharePoint 2010 farm and configure it to use claims-based authentication, most likely with accounts you create in a SQL database.  There’s many blog posts on configuring claims-based authentication.  Here’s one that I found helpful:

http://donalconlon.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/configuring-forms-base-authentication-for-sharepoint-2010-using-iis7/

The next step is to install Project Server 2010 into the farm.  You should also make sure some other services are properly configured, such as the secure store and Excel services.  Here’s a good place to start, for steps on installing Project Server:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662109.aspx

Once project server is installed, and you configure a project server site collection such as https://extranet.company.com/pwa, the tricky part is delegating access inside PWA (Project Web Access) to the external users.  You’ll need to create all of the external accounts in the SQL database first, and ensure that these accounts have rights to log into SharePoint.  Then, as an administrator, go into PWA and into Server Settings –> Manage Users.  You’ll need to create a new PWA user for each account that will log into PWA and assign permissions to it.  Just make sure that the “user logon account” matches the external accounts (or internal accounts) that you are giving access to.  For a regular active directory account, it’s easy.  You would just list the account as domain\user.  However, with your external user SQL accounts, you need to list them with the membership provider, like the following: i:0#.f|fbamembershipprovider|user

After users are given permission to PWA, you’ll also have to give them individual permissions to projects that you’ve uploaded to Project Server.  As an administrator, just view each project in PWA and click on the “Project Permissions” button.  You can create groups for each project and assign rights to that group or to individual users in “Project Permissions.”

After that’s done, external users should be able to go to your extranet, log in, and click on “Project Center” to see all of the projects that they have rights to.  Depending on their rights, external users could just view the project, or they could even manage the project and assign resources, tasks, and help build the corresponding SharePoint site.

If you create a Project Server 2010 extranet, just make sure your licensing is kept up to date.  You’ll need a CAL for each internal and external user.

Out of the box, Outlook 2010 has a setting which allows it to mine your sent items for common terms, and to upload those terms to SharePoint.  These terms are listed in your SharePoint MySite profile as suggested skills you can associate yourself with, or you can type in new ones.  Other employees in the firm can search based on those skills, and can view your profile information and your spot in the organization via the organizational browser.

But what if you don’t have users that would ever update their MySite or keep their skills up to date?

SharePoint has a great programatic interface to automate keeping this information up to date, and to broadcast changes out to colleagues.  We’ve successfully mined our time and billing system, ConnectWise, to pull out skills and project information related to people.  We set up an automated script that runs nightly to pull the information out and upload to SharePoint MySites.  It also broadcasts the updates out to your colleagues in a feed, similar to the status feed you would see on FaceBook.  This way, the firm can leverage information that is already going into the time and billing system, and allow people to view real time updates of the info in SharePoint, without requiring any additional manual data entry.

The script adds activities to everyone’s profile, which they will follow by default, but can also choose not to.  The screen shot below shows two options, to follow new projects added to the time and billing system, and to follow when people are added as team members to these projects.

Your colleagues would see notes similar to the one shown below, to indicate that you’ve been assigned to work on a project.

The colleague news feed is shown on the default page of your My Site, but we’ve also elected to put it on the home page of the corporate intranet, to make it more available.  Your colleagues in SharePoint start off as people in your group, determined by your manager, but we also elected to write a script to make everyone in the firm be a colleague of one another.  For a small firm, we felt it was advantageous to keep everyone in the loop about what others were doing.  In addition, we didn’t want to force people to have to “friend” other people, so we took the approach of automating everyone as a colleague.

Here’s some links to help developers get started in programming these social features.  The Microsoft SDK examples are particularly helpful.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/activityfeedsconsole
http://sp2010social.codeplex.com/

There’s more social features in SharePoint 2010 to take note of as well, such as note boards, tagging, tag clouds, and document ratings.  If you haven’t played with any of these features, it’s worth setting up a test site and taking a look at.  Even if SharePoint is not your DMS, there’s so many new interesting features that can help people stay in touch, collaborate, and find the right information better.

1)  Windows Explorer Folders

Any SharePoint library or folder can be opened in Windows Explorer.  You can also write a script to deploy shortcuts to people, or ask users to create their own shortcuts.  Users can create shortcuts to folders by opening the library in Windows Explorer, and right clicking any folder to create a shortcut.  If you want to deploy shortcuts or create shortcuts by hand, they can be structured as follows:

\\SharePointSiteName.Domain.com\DavWWWRoot\Library\Folder

Note, that you would have to open the Explorer window in a separate window, and then drag out of Outlook and into that Explorer window.

2)  SharePoint Workspace 2010

If you’re using Office Professional Plus 2010, then you probably already have this program.  SharePoint Workspace is the successor to Groove, and is a full client for SharePoint.  You can sync any SharePoint site, list, or library to Workspace, and you get the advantage of being able to take files offline, add files offline, and sync any changes to and from the server.  You can initiate the connection to Workspace either from within Workspace or from a button in the ribbon in the SharePoint web interface.  As is the case with Windows Explorer, Workspace has to be open in another window outside of Outlook, but you can drag emails and attachments out from Outlook and into your folders in SharePoint Workspace.  This also gives you the advantage of being able to do drag and drops while you’re offline.

Using either of these approaches, you won’t be able to “live” inside Outlook, as you could with a traditional DMS.  But you do end up with a way to do drag and drops to a separate window, and not have to go through the SharePoint web interface.  So this could provide some help for anyone who wants to do email management “light” and doesn’t want to invest in an addin for Outlook.  But for the full blown email management experience, that you might be used to from FileSite or another DMS, then you should consider looking at one of the third-party addins.

The complete install, using the configuration dialogs, will not let you enter local accounts, and will force you to use a domain account.  The best practice seems to be to promote the server to a domain controller, and use domain accounts, however this might not be possible or desired if you’re working in a DMZ, or on a development machine.  Also, you might want to do the complete install so that you can leverage the 10 GB data limit and remote BLOB storage in SQL 2008 Express R2, rather than being stuck to the earlier version of SQL Express which comes with SharePoint.   Luckily, there’s some ways to bypass the domain account requirement by using PowerShell scripting to set up the environment.  I found two helpful blog posts below which get you part of the way there, and I’ll help clarify some of the missing pieces.

The first step is to install SharePoint in complete mode, but not to run the products and technology configuration wizard.  You’ll need to set up the configuration database using PowerShell if you want to use local accounts.  Follow this blog post for setting up the configuration database.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=112

You can continue with the configuration wizard after that, and will find that the farm has been configured correctly with the local administrator account.

At this point, everything in central administration should work except for searching.  The search query component will be stuck in “Initializing” state, and will never come online.  If you do any searches on the front-end, you’ll also get a SharePoint error, given the state of the query component.  To fix this, you’ll need to delete the Search Service Application, from the list of service applications, and then create a new one using PowerShell.  Follow this blog post, specifically the “The Search Fix” section, for how to do this in PowerShell.

http://soerennielsen.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/how-to-install-a-sharepoint-2010-complete-server-without-ad/

To clarify the steps for actually running the script, in Step 1 in the article, you actually have to run a command like the following in PowerShell to load the script:

. c:\SetupEnterpriseSearch.ps1

Then you have to run the following command to launch the function:

Start-EnterpriseSearch(“<path>\searchconfig.xml”)

Make sure that you have the correct settings in the XML file ahead of time.  After running this PowerShell script, the search service application should be built and online, and you should be able to build the index and start searching.

Here’s an example of how the menus open by default, behind the Flash content.

After much digging around, I was able to find a way to correctly display the menus in front of Flash content.  You have to add the following parameters to your actual object html code for the Flash object, to make it transparent.

Add the following parameter to the OBJECT tag:

   <param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>

Add the following parameter to the EMBED tag:

   wmode=”transparent”

After that the page menus should load correctly, as shown below.

If you choose to keep the 2007 master page and add the new controls into it, this post lists all of the steps:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee539981(office.14).aspx

If you plan to start with a new 2010 master page, a starter minimal master page can be found here:

http://startermasterpages.codeplex.com/

I also found the following pages invaluable.  This blog post lists all of the base css classes in the SharePoint master page.

http://erikswenson.blogspot.com/2010/01/sharepoint-2010-base-css-classes.html

This blog lists the styles you’ll need to modify to change the look and feel of the menus:

http://blog.drisgill.com/2009/11/sp2010-branding-tip-7-using-simple.html

In SharePoint 2010, this can be done pretty easily in the CSS file by modifying the following two styles.

#s4-leftpanel
{
 display:none;
}

That style controls the left navigation panel, and setting the display to none effectively hides the entire section.  Hiding this section is not enough though, since the body area uses a left margin to specify where to start the body section.  So you would also need to modify the following style, to tell the body area to start at 5 pixels from the left, or wherever you want to start the main area.

.s4-ca
{
 margin-left: 5px;
 background: transparent;
}

Once this limit is reached, you’ll see errors like the following, when trying to do anything in SharePoint.  I saw this error just trying to activate a feature.  You’ll also get errors when tying to check out files or import new files.

Could not allocate space for object ‘dbo.EventCache’.'EventCache_Id’ in database

Some solutions to work around this are to switch to SQL Server, which doesn’t have a file size limit, or to try to implement remote BLOB storage.  Getting the BLOBS out of SQL will significantly reduce the database size.  If the environment is just a test environment, you could also delete enough files out of the database or move files to a different database.