New Beta Available: The Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint

I am happy to announce the beta release for the Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint. We are making this beta release available in order to get feedback from our customers and partners. With your help, we can ensure that the Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint (ECTS) meets your needs.

What is the Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint?

The Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint provides guidance and tools to deploy a pre-built, customizable SharePoint solution that teams can use to collaborate with those outside the firewall. At the same time, the toolkit helps ensure that sensitive data on these systems is protected.Using this free toolkit, administrators can set up a secure, SharePoint-based extranet collaboration site in a short time.  End users can then use this site to easily create new site collections, posting sharable documents that are centrally located inside the firewall.  The toolkit also enables users to invite internal and external partners to collaborate on documents.  And the toolkit makes it simple for team leads to assign or revoke access rights for any team member.

Once the ECTS is installed, your users can be up and running with a secure, SharePoint-based team site in minutes.  They can easily invite and enable external users to collaborate with them, sharing documents that are centrally located on a SharePoint site inside the firewall.  Administrators can require administrative approval for all new sites and users, or can allow precisely control the information outsiders can access, or they can delegate this control to end users and free up time for other tasks.

Where do I access the Beta?

To get started with the beta, please click here, then click the Downloads link. Note that you may have to register to get access to the Connect site.  On the list of downloads, click the Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint. From this page, download all the beta files. I recommend that you read the Release Notes first to learn about any late breaking information related to the ECTS.