SharePoint Public Websites with Office 365
- Posted by: Hayden Sinclair
I have been asked by a few clients about the merits of using SharePoint as a public facing website.
If you are using SharePoint 2013 for your Intranet then my recommendation is to certainly use SharePoint 2013 for your public facing Internet site as well.
If you currently have a great looking website that works for you (is Number 1 in Google, looks great and is easy to update), you have no need to jump to SharePoint. If you are about to start an Internet refresh project and you are already using SharePoint internally, is indeed the way to go.
The biggest reason to choose a self-hosted version of SharePoint Server is that you can reuse your carefully collated Managed Metadata across both your Intranet and Internet sites. This will improve the search experience for both employees and external visitors alike.
External visitors will quickly find information they are after (as the content has been pre-tagged with search friendly metadata), while internal employees will be able to find content from your Public facing site within their (internal) Intranet searches.
An information sharing mindset, should be engrained within most organisations, but why not share as much information as possible with your customers as well.
My prediction is that over time more companies will host their (non-sensitive) product information repositories on their public facing sites, rather than intranets. Surfacing “Internal Only” sections on these pages can be accomplished with a Search-Driven web part, carefully pulling permission protected information to the page for employee eyes-only.
NOTE: Since I published this article Microsoft have announced they will discontinue the Public Website feature in 2017.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/3027254
If you already have a SharePoint Public site you will have to make alternative arrangements before 2017.
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If you are using SharePoint 2013 for your Intranet then my recommendation is to certainly use SharePoint 2013 for your public facing Internet site as well.
If you currently have a great looking website that works for you (is Number 1 in Google, looks great and is easy to update), you have no need to jump to SharePoint. If you are about to start an Internet refresh project and you are already using SharePoint internally, is indeed the way to go.
The biggest reason to choose a self-hosted version of SharePoint Server is that you can reuse your carefully collated Managed Metadata across both your Intranet and Internet sites. This will improve the search experience for both employees and external visitors alike.
External visitors will quickly find information they are after (as the content has been pre-tagged with search friendly metadata), while internal employees will be able to find content from your Public facing site within their (internal) Intranet searches.
An information sharing mindset, should be engrained within most organisations, but why not share as much information as possible with your customers as well.
My prediction is that over time more companies will host their (non-sensitive) product information repositories on their public facing sites, rather than intranets. Surfacing “Internal Only” sections on these pages can be accomplished with a Search-Driven web part, carefully pulling permission protected information to the page for employee eyes-only.
NOTE: Since I published this article Microsoft have announced they will discontinue the Public Website feature in 2017.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/3027254
If you already have a SharePoint Public site you will have to make alternative arrangements before 2017.