External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint

The External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint provides authoritative guidance and tools to deploy a customizable solution built on Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 that teams can use to collaborate with partners outside the firewall. Once it is deployed, the toolkit’s familiar desktop interface makes the solution easy for project teams to understand and use.

Using this free toolkit, users can be up and running with a SharePoint-based collaboration site in minutes. They can easily create new sites, and invite external users to share documents that are centrally located on a SharePoint site—inside the firewall. Site owners can easily customize the site, and provide access rights for team members.

IT Pros can stay in control by requiring administrative approval for these activities. Or they can allow end users to set up and manage collaboration sites on their own—freeing up scarce IT resources for higher-value activities.

The External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint helps boost security by creating each collaboration site as a SharePoint site collection. This ensures that teams using one collaboration site will not be able to view documents on another collaboration site, unless they are explicitly given access.

In addition, the toolkit puts all external users in Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM)—the Microsoft lightweight directory service—rather than in the organization’s primary internal directory—further reducing your customers’ security risks.