Intranet To The Internet?

[Ean]

So I started a new job in October and control over the intranet and website has been handed over to me.

 

After essentially starting from scratch re-building the intranet (it was built entirely using tables) they seem to think I know more than I actually do.

 

To cut a long story short our team in France came over last week and saw the content we had on the intranet and have asked if we can share it with them. My boss happily told them that of course we'd make it available to them...and then asked me how to do it.

 

Essentially I have no idea how to make this happen, we work for a large technology company and some of the stuff on there is very confidential. My boss would like the entire intranet available to the French team but also thinks it would be useful for when members of our team work from home. So I'm assuming some kind of log-in to the site but don't know if this is possible. Even if I manage this step the content would have to be unsearchable by web-crawlers.

 

I've googled but there seem to be so many options that I'm asking the knowledgeable web people on here for advice and perhaps a tried and tested method.

[Bombay Bad Boy]

My first choice would be a VPN. Assumably, you're all using Windows?

[Ean]

Unfortunately not, we are all using Macs though so it's not a complete battleground trying to get different systems to speak to each other. I did think about VPN but again it's a subject I know very little about.

[Bombay Bad Boy]

Unfortunately not, we are all using Macs

:D

 

Now, now, as Mac users, surely you should be evangelising

[Slim]

Essentially I have no idea how to make this happen, we work for a large technology company and some of the stuff on there is very confidential. My boss would like the entire intranet available to the French team but also thinks it would be useful for when members of our team work from home. So I'm assuming some kind of log-in to the site but don't know if this is possible. Even if I manage this step the content would have to be unsearchable by web-crawlers.

 

You've two choices, either make it public on the interwang and password protect it, or set up a vpn. I wouldn't do the former, an intranet that needs a password will be crap for everyone. You could stick it up then only permit connections from their ip, if they're fixed. Not 100% secure but not bad, depends how sensitive it is eh?

 

VPN, doesn't really matter if you're on pc's or macs, as you'd be doing it at the firewall level. Isn't there a requirement for some sort of inter company vpn anyway?

 

To be honest though, this isn't something you want to set up half arsed, there's a fair few pitfalls involved, you need to know what you're doing.

[joeyconcrete]

To be honest though, this isn't something you want to set up half arsed, there's a fair few pitfalls involved, you need to know what you're doing.

 

I'd echo that. I don't think you mention whether your French colleagues should be permitted to access everything, or, just the Intranet. If some restrictions are needed, then your average consumer grade (or even SME) router may not have granular controls for site-to-site VPN traffic. Some do, although some are lacking.

 

To elaborate on what Slim said - you could stick an SSL certificate on your Intranet site, port-forward 443 on your router and lock it down to their IP address. Like before, many routers are fairly lacking when it comes to port-forwarding\NAT, most allow you to forward a port, it's not that-common to allow you to restrict the source.

 

You do say the data is very confidential, so yeh, I'd make sure it's done properly.

 

One final idea, and perhaps the most simplistic. You don't say whether the content is static (html\css\images\xml) or dynamic\live (php\asp) - if it's static, non-database driven, couldn't you zip it up periodically and either FTP or e-mail them a copy.?

[Uni]

Use a VPN to present the website externally. It won't matter what OS they are on, as long as they have a web-browser.

 

Juniper SA-4000 maybe?