The Zen of Hosting: Part 7 - MOSS
Next up on the technology list I want to profile in the series is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), which you may think is easy since HMC supports its little brother, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). Unfortunately, the added complexity MOSS brings adds significant challenges to the mix, and the first question is: How do you deal with users in MOSS while keeping customers separate? Dealing with users means that you must provide all the functionality of the authentication system—and any web part in MOSS (like the People Picker)—while making sure one customer doesn’t see anything or anyone from another customer.
Well, the answer is easy: use a custom authentication provider. Out of the box, the AD provider is not up to the task, as it means all users can see everyone else. The next thought might be to use the forms-based one, but that means additional replication of users from AD to a database, which is also a pain. MOSS also includes a generic LDAP provider, which seems like the perfect fit—you can specify the root OU to start from (thus limiting what each site can see)—but this provider is very error-prone due to the HMC structure/properties, so in the end, you’re better off building your own LDAP provider. So all you need to do once the custom authentication provider is built is to create a custom provider for HMC, which sets up and manages site creation and feeds the information on what a customer has directly to HMC.
A great example of how this is done is one of our first customers, who got their own mini-environment within our hosted environment. So they don’t sit on our big MOSS farm; they have their own one and have some special customizations to it—but the principles of their solution and the HMC one are very similar. The customer is South African Tourism (SAT), and their website is www.freesatsite.co.za. One of the special changes is the use of a specialized custom authentication provider, which was switched from an LDAP one to one that uses Windows Live! (so your MSN login becomes your website login—how cool is that?). It also includes a full self-provisioning system, which allows SAT members to log in and provision a new site in seconds. Rather than being completely separate domains, each new website is a sub-site of www.freesatsite.co.za.
Please don’t think I suddenly became a great MOSS expert—I really just provided servers and the environment for this brilliant solution. The team that built this solution are the guys from Blacklight, who designed the UI and all the theme support, and Mark Lenferna de la Motte and his team, who did the bulk of the heavy lifting configuration to make MOSS do its magic.