Essential SharePoint

Creating Self-Hosted Sites

All of the tasks in the preceding sections also apply to sites you create on your own server. The major differences between hosted and self-hosted sites are that:

• You usually access self-hosted sites over an intranet rather than the Internet, so those sites are automatically trusted, and you have fewer client security issues to worry about.

• Since self-hosted sites are usually part of your network, you can quickly grant all network users access to the site (see the section "Adding Members Quickly" later in this chapter).

• You must install and maintain SharePoint yourself, which requires more knowledge about tools like IIS, SQL, and Windows security than you need when using hosted sites.

• You have direct access to the server, so you have both more control and more responsibility (for backups, etc.) than in a hosted environment.

The rest of this chapter explores installing SharePoint and creating SharePoint sites on your own server. If you've already decided to stick with a hosted site, you can skip ahead to the section "Allowing Anonymous Access," because the next sections don't really apply to you.