Is MOSS really a secure web-ready CMS?

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

While I’ve not been doing a massive amount of SharePoint development in recent months, my company has decided to focus the internal technology team on a sizable web-site project. Since “time to market” was a key factor, it seemed sensible to pick an off-the-shelf content management system to drive the site. Initially we began evaluating enterprise solutions. MOSS had been selected as the CMS of choice due to a suggested perception that it was a secure and tested product.

In the Intranet world, there is some truth in the statement that SharePoint provides good security. On a company network, you can authenticate logins through a number of methods (Kerberous, LDAP) browsing the web for MOSS security brings all manner of techniques for securing SharePoint behind the firewall. However, on the web we are pretty much forced into using form based authentication in conjunction with the DotNet membership API, as with any other (DotNet) CMS. Sure, we also have the groups/roles/user permissions architecture coupled with the audience targeting on page content and the security that you get with the search engine – but we can find that out of the box on more web targeted products. The licensing required to put SharePoint on the web as a CMS is costly, and as a CMS the interface is often arguably less intuitive than the competition.

Don’t get me wrong. Exposing SharePoint over the web to leverage line of business data can be extremely useful. But for typical CMS needs, we wondered what MOSS really brought to the table. On paper it didn’t seem like enough to justify the huge time costs involved in adapting it to meet our requirements. We began evaluating it against the likes of sitecore, community server, DotNetNuke and many other leaner web-ready products and found ourselves settling on a middle-weight platform that matched our functional requirements very closely. The jury is still out on MOSS as a super secure platform for CMS, maybe you have a different oppinion?

I think the EMS/CMS Worlds are closing fast. SharePoint 2010 is touted to include vastly improved social networking solutions. I wonder what kind of security implications this relationship between behind the firewall data and the company Internet offering will have? Even in a form content staging/workflow environment will employees be able to handle the sheer power of drag-and-dropping data from the Intranet to the corporate web-site?

Tags: Security
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3 Free Utilities a SharePoint geek should know about

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

While I really need to do a full write up of all the cool stuff I’ve been doing recently integrating various jQuery tricks into SharePoint, my only real motivation for doing so would be to max out my Google page ranking as I still feel my write up last month covered everything any flexible web developer would need to know. Instead, I wanted to rave about three pieces of software that you should really check out.

1. Wink by Satish Kumar. S. is a superb piece of free software I’ve been aware of for a few years now, since it received some award or another. It allows you to record a desktop session, or a window or a rectangle of the screen or…whatever and output the playback as embedded flash on a web page, or a movie. Further more you can edit the play back to include word bubbles with messages in or arrows or button controls. You can even record sound. This week I’m producing SharePoint user training material, and Wink has allowed me to produce a number of short flash tutorials I can embed onto pages in SharePoint itself.

2. If fancy flash demo training examples don’t float your boat then Cam Studio (By various authors) is a lovely bit of free software worth a look. It allows you to record full video screen casts with sound and, if you like, embed your webcam output at the side of the screen.

3. Finally, how do you work with SharePoint at home? Myself, I don’t like to have development servers running all the time. Instead I like to virtualise. While hosting Windows 2003 on Vista ultimate was acceptable (On my quad core desktop) I’ve now discovered the joy of running Sun’s Virtual Box using Linux as a host (If you’re afraid of Linux scardy-pants you can try out the Windows version as an alternative to Virtual Machine or VMWare). While Vista struggled to run a SharePoint server, Ubuntu (My current Linux distro of choice) is running a Windows 2003 server and a Windows XP client machine just fine, with only the occasional slowness when both machines were updating service packs, but for the most part it’s as though they aren’t there (Vista would slow down and complain bitterly by grinding the hard drive when I tried to do anything with my virtual server). The most impressive thing is flicking between full screen mode, which when you have the ‘guest additions’ (Sun’s version of VM add ons) software installed on the target machine is a wondrous experience of effortlessness.

This has finally made Linux a very useable workspace for me as with most professional software people I’m normally stuck in a very Microsoft world day to day.

Look familiar?

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Space filler

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

I’m currently preparing two write ups for this blog, the first is some simple workflow guide. The last time I looked at custom workflow within SharePoint it felt a bit rough around the edges, what with the amount of things I had to install to get VS 2005 to play ball. I’m hoping to discover an improvement.

Thought for the day. What would happen if you took one big corporation’s technology and used it with another big corporation’s technology. Answer: I’ve no idea. But I’m really thinking about..experimenting (you fool you’ll kill us all etc)

This morning WordPress identified an incoming link which led me to one stirling review of my study guide from a certain ‘Bobs’, who has just completed 70-542. Congratulations to him and thanks for the kind words. Although I’m certain that ‘Bobs’ clearly already has the genius level required to be a certified SharePoint developer regardless of a few notes and links, its good to know there are people out there who have used the write up for what it is intended for.

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