1.7. Accessing SharePoint over the Internet
Very soon after you start working with SharePoint, you will find that it contains more and more of your business-critical data. You also become aware of the fact that you need online access to the SharePoint server in order to work with the documents, projects, and everything else stored in the SharePoint database. So you start thinking, "How do I access this information when I am not at the office?" One way is to use the offline functionality of MS Outlook 2007, which allows a user to make a copy for a document library in an Outlook folder, thus making it possible to read and even update documents while offline. Another answer is: You can make your SharePoint information accessible over the Internet, in a secure way, while still getting good performance. You have to plan this carefully and configure SharePoint and the other modules involved, such as the firewall.
NOTE
If the SharePoint server is accessible over the Internet, SharePoint 2007 allows even a mobile phone to connect to a SharePoint list using a special view that only shows text.
1.7.1. How You Do It
Because SharePoint is a web application running on top of IIS 6, it is very easy to make SharePoint accessible from outside your organization. You simply open up your firewall so that it allows connections to the SharePoint server from the outside. But this is not a good solution from a security perspective. This leaves your SharePoint server wide open to the world, and there ...
