Enable your SharePoint Extranet with Extranet Collaboration Manager

If you are planning to or already have implemented SharePoint 2007 for your extranet, you are facing the challenging process of using scarce IT resources to get collaborative extranet sites provisioned and accessible. Once online, the ongoing tasks for user management of these collaborative applications will have to be identified and assigned. Out-of-the box, SharePoint 2007 provides many of the raw capabilities necessary for extranet collaboration, but is missing critical tools that SharePoint administrators need to establish, maintain and monitor the collaboration environment.

Extranet Collaboration Manager by SharePoint Solutions is a complete solution that will:

Simplify the provisioning and maintenance of external resources for use with your business partners
Enable you to automate site provisioning requests through workflows
Delegate user management tasks to your business partners
Provide you with the capability to audit the provisioning and user maintenance activities within your collaborative
environment.

Companies in a wide range of industries are accelerating their business with the help of effective external collaboration. Open new doors with your business partners and reduce the cost of managing your SharePoint Extranet.

What do our customers say about ExCM?

"What Microsoft gives you out-of-the-box is like pieces of wood, not fence sections – ExCM unfolds the fence in your back yard at the push of a button."

Bill Davidson
CIO, MARS Advertising

"ExCM puts the power into the business and gets it out of IT."

Shawn Snowdy
Senior Systems Engineer, La-Z-Boy

Case Study: Global Management Consultancy Boosts Client Service, Competitiveness, with Extranet. A.T. Kearney, based in Chicago, Illinois, is a leading management consultancy that serves clients in all major industries as well as government agencies. It has more than 2,500 employees worldwide.

Learn more about Extranet Collaboration Manager, Site Provisioning Assistant and SharePoint by reading the AT Kearney Customer Solution Case Study.

Fact Sheet: Extranet Collaboration Manager ExCM - provides you with a suite of tools to simplify SharePoint extranet user access and management.
Extranet Collaboration Manager provides a comprehensive set of features that enable a wide variety of organizations to take collaboration in their SharePoint Extranet to the next level. This fact sheet contains a summary of ExCM's features.
Provide user management capabilities to delegated administrators
A Delegated Administrator is a site user that has been given the additional ability to manage users for a SharePoint Extranet site using Extranet Collaboration Manager's delegation components. Delegated Administrators can perform user management tasks such as inviting new users, unlocking user accounts and resetting user passwords. Also, you can optionally allow Delegated Administrators to explicitly add or delete users. Typically, a Delegated Administrator only has the rights to edit a sub-set of site users as defined by his or her 'Scope of Administration'. The 'Scope of Administration' for a Delegated Administrator is defined by a site administrator and depends on the Delegation Type configured for the site. A Delegated Administrator does not typically have privileged administrative access to the SharePoint 2007 site.
Allow SharePoint Extranet Site access through user self-registration or by invitation only
"We chose SharePoint Solutions' ExCM because we needed a way to manage external users accessing our SharePoint sites. There are several ways to manage those users out-of-the-box: either by creating Active Directory accounts, creating a separate AD farm for external users, or using a straightforward FBA model, but those options wouldn't have solved the system administrators' major problem of user management." -- David Chan DraftFCB Uninvited registrations allow anonymous users to self-register for access to your SharePoint Extranet site. When an uninvited registration is completed, the new user is added to the 'Uninvited Registration Group' as defined in the Delegation Settings page. Invited registrations allow a Site Administrator or a Delegated Administrator to invite users to the site. When a new invitation is created, permissions for the new user are defined by, but may not exceed the permissions of the user sending the invitation. A customizable e-mail will be sent to the registration invitee containing a registration link and directions describing the registration process. Invitations expire if not completed within three days. As a point of extensibility, you also have the opportunity to define a custom registration process. This allows an organization to integrate custom, typically more advanced registration scenarios into the solution.
Gather Custom data when invited or uninvited users register for access to your SharePoint Extranet site
Before either invited or uninvited users may access your SharePoint Extranet site, they must first visit a user registration page and provide a username, password, and password recovery question. Uninvited users must also provide their e-mail address on the registration page (an invited user's e-mail address is already known). As a point of extensibility, you can define additional data fields for a user to fill-in when he or she registers for site access. These additional fields can be either required or optional for the user to complete. As an example, you may want to ask a new user to provide his or her company name and phone number.
Allow site users to change their own passwords
When a user is logged into your SharePoint Extranet site with ExCM - SE's delegation components enabled, he or she will be presented with a "Change My Password" personal action from the Welcome menu. This feature can optionally be configured on or off.
Keep track of all user management activity with auditing
All ExCM user management related activities that occur within your site are logged for auditing purposes. Logged activities include user creation, invitation and deletion as well as password resets and changes.
Gather Detailed user Profile Data From Site Users
When ExCM - SE's user profile management is enabled, your SharePoint Extranet site's users can be allowed to view and update their own detailed user profile data.
Registration Approval Process
Define a list of approvers to review invited and/or anonymous registrations. When a user registers the account will remain unapproved until reviewed by an approver. One or more approvers will be notified of the pending registration. After reviewing the account the approver can approve or deny the request. The registering user will then be notified of the approval status.
Pre-Approved Domain Names
A list of pre-approved domain names can be defined. When a user registers for access to the site, his or her account will automatically be approved if the registering domain names exists in the pre-approved domain name list.
Account Verification
When a anonymous user registers for site access, a message will be sent to the user's e-mail address asking the user to verify the account. The user can access the site only after verification.
User Automation Job Enforces Password Expiration and Activity Expiration
ExCM now contains a list of STSADM commands which can be use to create and manage user automation operations such as password expiration and account activity expiration. The job will notify users of pending expirations via e-mail. If a corrective action is not taken the account will be locked out. The age of the lockout and the notification window are customizable using STSADM. You can also customize the notification messages for each event.