Extranet Collaboration Manager (Enterprise) by SharePoint Solutions
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0.0 |
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2.8 (5) |
Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2007 provides a comprehensive set of features that enable a wide variety of organizations to take extranet collaboration to the next level. 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 DraftFCBUninvited 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.
User reviews
Average user rating from: 5 user(s)
Lots of customisation required if you want to use
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
We installed this on WSS 3.0 with two web applications: internal (excm) and external (extranet) so that internal staff could use windows authentication while the external staff use forms-based authentication. The alternative is to have a single extranet application so that your internal staff have to login as well - not ideal.
We had major issues with e-mails... what happens if someone external receives an e-mail containing an internal link - the link fails. What happens if internal staff receive an external link, they're prompted to login to the external site. Our server guys had to spend days to work out a system of redirects to resolve this issue.
Other issues... logging in is slow but this could be due to our ISA server. Had trouble with explorer view... cannot drag and drop files over 5MB. When configuring the naming convention for the user's passwords the page just errors if they don't enter a correctly formatted password, it just displays a default SharePoint error page. And then, when they navigate back it's lost all the information that they input. Can you think of any other system that would operate like this? You enter your password and you get nothing... no notice, no warning and no reason as to why an error occurred.
If you're going to use this product then my advice is to use it just as an extranet with a single extranet web application so that both internal and external users have to login. It will save a lot of messing around. And don't expect anything fancy - don't expect any kind of reporting or a tool for removing expired user etc, - it's as basic as it can be.
Product Reviews
| Pros | You get an extranet |
| Cons | The functionality if very basic, don't expect anything special
Lots of custom configuration required. |
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Well done product
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Nicely integrated workflow to request an outside user to register, have that user actually register and finally to create the user and assign them to a specific security group.
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Great product to get you started with WSS/MOSS
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Overall, this is a great product. Unless you have developers that are very familiar with SharePoint development with spare time, this is a great investment. The price is very affordable, and I guarantee it is cheaper than re-writing it yourself from ground up.
The product utilizes the standard ASP.net profile database, so there is plenty of documentation out there. They also provide their own documentation that is specific to the SharePoint add-ons and setup/config of the product. Having a background in ASP.net definitely helps in understanding why you are doing the things that you are doing when you do the configuration. Quite a few of the settings are in the web.config files – I would like to see some of this move into the UI and managed at the web application level (from SharePoint central admin).
Product Reviews
| Pros | Easy to setup
Good documentation
Support from SharePoint Solutions (via email or phone)
Decent price point |
| Cons | Lots of settings are only configurable at the site collection level - option for web application level settings would make administration easier |
| Version Reviewed | ExCM for WSS 3.0 |
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Good functionality / customization is not easy
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Good functionality to start your Extranet with forms authentication, it uses SQL Server database as repository and it is based on the ASP.NET authentication model, which is a plus.
Installing it is not too easy but with their support we were able to have it installed and running in a couple of hours.
There are things we suggested for improving the product but their approach is to bill for custom development, so far we are using it out-of-the box with minor SQL side improvements as views, etc.
For example, the approved domains is great, but if your list is big, you need to do it by adding lines to the web.config, we suggested to move them to a table but that was custom work and never added to be product.
All in all, the product is solid and works as advertised, but not evolving as far as we can see.
Product Reviews
| Pros | All functionality works well
Easy to use, add menues to "all setting pages"
Integrates well with MOSS |
| Cons | Product have not improved/evolved in a while
All suggestions are routed as custom work, even for reasonable request as moving the approved domains out of the web.config into a table |
| Version Reviewed | Extranet Collaboration Manager (Standard) |
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Hard to customize
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Hard to customize the product since we don't get SDK or any API. Not enough instruction how to customize. Every time I post question in their form about customization, they only send some link from MS TechNet site.
If you’re a SharePoint Administrator who doesn’t know programming, it’s not possible at all to customize the product. I bought this product for the company where I work and we want to customize the login process but to customize this product vendor is asking 20k. The product only cost 6K.
I have decided not to use this product anymore and we want to go with SharePoint form authentication and customize and built our own custom form.
Product Reviews
| Pros | Easy installation, easy to use |
| Cons | Hard to customize, not enough support about customization |
| Version Reviewed | ExCM |
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