It can be a little daunting if you're new to SharePoint and tasked with doing something you've never done before. Can it be done in SharePoint? Will doing it break your site or the entire installation? Is doing it so difficult it's not worth doing? Configuring anonymous access is one of those tasks because you're dealing with SharePoint (and ASP.NET indirectly), your site collection (and potentially your database indirectly), IIS, and occasionally the file system.

At the time of writing there are a number of sites and blog posts out there offering instructions on how to configure anonymous access. Some are extremely detailed--and depending on what you're trying to accomplish, unnecessarily so. Others are a bit vague. ASPHostCentral.com presents this article to any Sharepoint users and we certainly hope it can help the community, particularly to those who are using Sharepoint 2010 services. In case you are looking to host your Sharepoint 2010 site, you can always start from as low as $9.99/month only!

What you'll find below is a detailed step-by-step set of instructions for setting up anonymous access for a fully branded web site like http://www.westernaustralia.com/. The anonymous access site gives internet users the ability to browse the site without having to log in and another site allows content editors to post content updates using their domain accounts.

A bit of background information

In brief, the steps below involve 'extending an existing web application' (that's a SharePoint concept) by creating a sister web app from an existing web app. The extended web app will use the same content database as the original and will be configured to support anonymous access. The top-level site of the database will also be configured to support anonymous access. As a final option, I'll show you how to disable all other types of non-anonymous access

The following tasks should be completed by a server administrator and assume you have already created a web application the normal way (it might be a good idea to ensure it's working before you begin...)

1. Extend an existing web application

- Open the Central Administration console and select the Application Management tab
- Select Create or extend Web application from the SharePoint Web Application Management section
- Select Extend an existing Web application on the next screen
- Select an existing web application to extend
- Modify the description and configure the port and, optionally, the host header
- Set Allow Anonymous to Yes
- Set the Load Balanced URL Zone to Internet (you may choose another zone here if you like but Internet generally means anonymous so it's the best option).

Once you've extended a web application, the new (i.e. extended) application seems to disapper from the Central Administration screens: it won't be listed as a web application and it doesn't appear as an option when selecting a web app. You will, however, get a new directory for the extended web app under inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\ and a new IIS site; you can also remove the extended site from SharePoint if required

2. Enable anonymous access on the site's corresponding site collection

Although the site collection will be shared by the existing web application and the anonymous web application, the following steps must be completed via the anonymous web application
- Browse to the home page of the extended web application
- Select Site Settings --> Modify All Site Settings from the Site Actions drop-down menu
- Under Users and Permissions, select the Advanced permissions link
- Select Anonymous Access from the Settings menu
- Set Anonymous Access to Entire Web site

Sites inherit the permissions of their parent by default so if you have any problems with a specific site you can ensure it's set to inherit permission from here as well (browse to the site settings screen for the relevant site first).

If you can’t see the Anonymous Access menu item, either the web app hasn’t been configured for anonymous access (see above or below) or you’re accessing the site via the default zone instead of the internet zone—you must access the site via the internet zone (at the extended URL).

3. Test

- Browse to the anonymous site in Firefox (or turn off integrated windows authentication if you're using IE); the site should be rendered without the Site Actions menu and other SharePoint controls
- Browse to a SharePoint administration screen (eg. /_layouts/settings.aspx) and you should be prompted to supply login credentials

At this point your site is set up to allow anonymous access but will also prompt you to log in as an administrator if you hit any of the SharePoint screens. This may be desirable but alternatively you may want to lock down external access to your public site; if that's the case, read on...

4. Remove integrated authentication from the anonymous web application (optional)

- Open the Central Administration console and select the Application Management tab
- Select Authentication providers from the Application Security section
- Select the Internet zone (this is the zone specified when the anonymous application was extended).
- Deselect Integrated Windows authentication
- Set Enable Client Integration to No

5. Test

- Browse to the anonymous site in Firefox (restart any open browser windows if you receive a 401 error immediately after completing step 4). The home page should appear as it did previously.
- Browse to a SharePoint administration screen (eg. /_layouts/settings.aspx); you should receive a 401 UNAUTHORIZED HTTP error (which, in this case, is appropriate).

6. Troubleshooting

If you run into difficulties (mainly with 401s and 403s popping up where they shouldn't), these ideas may help

- Make sure the page you're trying to access is published. It's easy to forget this simple step in all the excitement but if a page (or image, etc) doesn't have at least one published version MOSS won't serve it up
- Reset IIS--it's quick an easy
- Grant the Read & Execute permission to the Authenticated Users group on the anonymous site's web.config and /bin directory (both can be found below Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories); do the same again for the authenticated site. Permissions on these files are reset every time the authentication method is changed in SharePoint
- Recognise extending a web app creates a new site in IIS and corresponding directory under wwwroot with its own web.config. Ensure the newly-created web.config in the extended site contains everything it needs to; ensure any virtual directories and applications are properly configured
- Redeploy any solutions, features, etc to make sure everything’s where it needs to be (custom private assemblies in particular)
- It's possible your custom code is doing something that requires elevated permissions. The Visual Studio debugger will help you locate the culprit. If you can't remove the offending code, you can wrap it using a delegate:

SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated elevatedAction =
new SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated(delegate() { /* dodgy stuff */ });
SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(elevatedAction);

- If necessary, remove the extended web application using the Central Administration console (also remove the IIS site) and start again


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

SharePoint server has become a very popular enterprise application to enhanced collaboration. As the quantity and value of data stored on SharePoint platform rises, backup and recovery becomes critical and it proves to be a challenge for administrators

ASPHostCentral.com, as the premier reliable and the most affordable Sharepoint 2010 hosting provider, proudly presents this article to anyone who are starting to use Sharepoint 2010 service and hopefully, it can truly help the Sharepoint Community. In case you are looking to host your Sharepoint 2010 site, you can always start from as low as $9.99/month only!

SharePoint offers full farm backup options out of the box: First, the web-based Central Administration backup and restore. Secondly, command-line backup tool stsadm.exe. Third option is SharePoint Designer

Unfortunately, these three options have some limitations: no true item level restore option (if a single item needs to be recovered, the entire site must be restored), manually front end backup necessarily , high restore time, frustrating command-line utilities, no back up directly to tape, no custom solution files backup, no IIS backup, no alternate access mappings backup

Because of the intricate nature of SharePoint server and its vital mission, companies investing in the platform should look for reliable backup and recovery solution able to provide complete range of protection. And since out of the box solution does not offer that level of protection, a third-party solution would be a good investment. This article presents most notable third-party backup and recovery solutions available on the market. Did I miss anything? What is your choice for SharePoint backup and recovery?

Microsoft has listened to its customers and has delivered a complete solution with System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM).


Data Protection Manager (DPM)

System Center Data Protection Manager delivers unified data protection for Windows servers and clients as a best-of-breed backup & recovery solution from Microsoft, for Windows environments. DPM 2010 provides the best protection and most supportable restore scenarios from disk, tape and cloud — in a scalable, manageable and cost-effective way

Key Benefits of Data Protection Manager (DPM):
- Recover site collections, individual sites, or an individual document in minutes
- Easy browse and restore of individual sites, documents, lists, ASPX pages, templates, contacts and entire SharePoint databases and systems
- Restore the entire configuration of SharePoint farm including the configuration database, administration content database, and the content databases
- Copy to a network folder or tape for archival purposes
- Restore a single content database to the SharePoint farm


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

New resources from Microsoft allow customers that plan to leverage the product lineup that is part of the Office 2010 launch to take advantage of multiple language options across their deployments. The 2010 Server Language Packs for SharePoint Server 2010, Project Server 2010, Search Server 2010, and Office Web Apps 2010 are currently available for download at no charge, allowing customers to build sites and site collections in multiple languages. The actual label of the language packs is rather self-explanatory when it comes down to the technologies that users will be able to employ in concert with the new technologies.

“Multiple language packs can be installed on the same server. Application of a Language Pack will not change the language of the installed Microsoft server product, or the language of the administrative features,” Microsoft stated. “You do not need to download a language pack for the language you installed, these language packs are to support creation of additional languages.”

SharePoint 2010, Project 2010, Search Server 2010, and Office Web Apps 2010 were released to manufacturing concomitantly with Office 2010 on April 15th. One interesting aspect in this regard is related to Office Web Apps 2010. In this particular case, only the flavor of the Office 2010 Cloud components designed for on-premise deployments on top of SharePoint 2010 were actually RTM’d. Microsoft is still working on finalizing the free online version that is offered through Windows Live SkyDrive, and will probably do so with the RTW of Windows Live Wave 4.

In addition to the resources mentioned above, the Redmond company is also offering for download Language Packs for SharePoint Foundation 2010. “Language packs enable creation of sites and site collections in multiple languages without requiring separate installations of SharePoint Foundation 2010,” the software giant stated.

2010 Server Language Packs for SharePoint Server 2010, Project Server 2010, Search Server 2010, and Office Web Apps 2010 is available for download here.

Language Packs for SharePoint Foundation 2010 is available for download here.


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

The following are the best 10 features and resources of Sharepoint 2010:

1. Social Media Investments – status integration with my sites, newsfeeds, my network, all that social media work around my site. You will expect to see this area really expanded through the public beta in terms of best practices and community awareness.  We hope to see some real effort from the community around helping establishing how to take advantage of these features.

2. External lists .  Showing a SQL table with contact information subsequently shown in a SharePoint external contact list, taken offline in the SharePoint Workspace, and contact objects shown in Outlook.  BDC becomes BCS (Business Connectivity Services) with even much easier systems integration.

3. Large lists – the list throttling was shown off in SharePoint 2010, but the real list sizes showing real scale and control from the farm administrator was impressive.  This was definitely used by the competition in the previous version to suggest that SharePoint didn’t scale.  Despite the ability to scale to 5 million items in a list in the 2007 version, the 2000 item limit per view was often suggested as a limit for the list due to poor use by end users of the features such as indexed columns, limiting the views or using folders.  Now with multi column indexes, and better control over item limited views, you can ensure that the queries are optimized and the list throttling and viewing will be better managed for performance of the server and the list.  The happy hour controls is a happy medium for those needing to break out to do queries that are not the best.  

4. Better Network Differencing & SharePoint Offline in SharePoint Workspace.  It’s still far from the 100% offline browsing experience,  that may be a pipe dream with what can be done with webparts and search.  But now we get lists, and external lists offline as well as what we had before.  The peer to peer is still there, but the SharePoint uses are much more core to the product.  The licensing model pushes this tool mainstream with Office 2010 deployments.  What’s it missing… you gotta know:  Blogs, Wikis, Pages… Of course you can get Blogs RSS feeds in Outlook.  So really it comes down to Wikis and Pages. 

5. High Availability/ Disaster Recovery Innovation. The now built in to be mirroring aware, and the removal of fault tolerance of the services such as scaled out indexing will make it TONS easier and more reliable to backup.  The configuration based backup is huge too.  If you’re not a SharePoint 2007 admin you don’t realize how crazy the backup and unreliable SSP backup/restore was. 

6. Unattached Recovery – We think it’s pretty big deal that the product team decided to invest in the ability to recover from a restored database. The UI is in central admin.  Essentially there is now an API for recovering data out of a database that isn’t in the farm.  This is huge for pulling data out of a snapshot, and really reduces the need for a recovery farm, while we don’t think it fully eliminates that need due to discovery, but that’s another blog. 

7. Admin Insights through the Logging & Usage database, and dev dashboard – The logging database with published schema!  Thank you!  That’s awesome.  The ULS logs were such a pain, definitely looking forward to seeing all the right stuff getting logged and throttled into a database that does know what filling up drive with pure chattiness means.  Those types of things do matter!  On the internet you do likely want to keep it off.  (Use STSADM or powershell to toggle the setting.)  Better to have people convinced the slowness is them or the wire, not the page or the server.  It would be over most heads of the people browsing an internet page anyway who would want to blame your server or SharePoint. 

8. Service Applications – The service oriented architectures and the buzz words of what SOA has become get a huge boost in SharePoint 2010.  We’d like the search from the central portal, the profiles from the social media farm, the taxonomy and meta data from the ECM environment, and analysis and access services from the Finance deployment.  As farms have become more specialized in large enterprises so have the expertise of those that run them.  The one off custom farms that may end up departmentalized, don’t have to be limited in their services.  They can get the richness of the global indexing and not have that be redundant indexing.

9. SharePoint Designer Enhancements like portable workflows, and granular delegation.  The huge innovations in SPD are exactly addressing the feedback that they were asked to implement, but only the SPD fans heard it.  Portable workflows is huge, so is that ability to have people use SPD in the way you want them to.  Only want them to use the FREE, yep still free tool for workflows, fine.  Only want the design team to use it for design, that’s cool.  The NDA kept us from telling you that SharePoint Designer really makes some big moves in the right direction around portability, control, and delegation.  The same areas, that we thought it needed most.  Let alone the even further flexibility of further integration, and BCS integration.

10. Sandbox Solutions – now solutions built from the SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio are all .WSP.  Great to see that consistency, but beyond that now SharePoint administrators can control the resources consumed from these client deployed sandboxed solutions which don’t require the admin to deploy.  While in the past SharePoint administrators needed to deploy any solution, this option, yep it’s an option, allows you to throttle the system resources and allow those who own/administer sites to deploy solutions.  The delegation and control is there.  We think we’ll see much more best practices from more usage of sandboxed solutions, but now custom farms can still run out of the box software.  It will be very interesting to see what can be done with these and how well the throttling of system resources works with these solutions.