How to share SharePoint website externally?

Question

I'm having issues on next steps to take... I'm currently working on this client exchange portal for our company. Our goal is relativity simple - to have external users sign in and upload documents to us instead of faxing them and vice versa.

I've set up the share point site and created form based authentication for our users.. using this tutorial..

http://sharepoint2013fba.codeplex.com/documentation?

I've tested login as a user and everything is good to go but i need to link it with our external website for them to login to.

Our website is... http://arsprofessionals.com/ When you go on the site you will see the Exchange Portal tab and we would like for our users to click on that tab and go to portal.arsprofessionals.com and have the SharePoint site appear there.

I've read information on Extending and/or applying the Alternative Access Mapping to it.. but I'm a bit confused on which direction to head. I feel like I need to make a change on my external website as well. Can anyone help lead me towards the right direction?

Please let me know if you need me to provide anymore informtion.

Thank you!

Update:

AAM -

Answer 1

From what I gather, your SharePoint server is currently internal only?

You will have to ensure the server either has a public ip, or a port is forwarded from the public ip to the internal server. Set the dns for portal.arsprofessionals.com to point to that public ip.

If you've done the default setup then right now when accessing your SharePoint site it will ask you if you want to login with either Windows or Forms authentication - so it's a 2 step process to login - choose the login type and then login. If you're ok with that, then simply add an alternate access mapping to the existing site for 'portal.arsprofessionals.com' and everything should be working.

If however you want public users to immediately be directed to the forms login page, then you have to extend the web application. Extending the web application lets you adjust the authentication type for a seperate set of AAM's for your site. So if users access it via an internal url (e.g. http://myinternalserver.local/) they could immediately be logged in via windows authentication, while users who access it via portal.arsprofessionals.com would be immediately directed to the forms login screen. Once you extend the web application you would setup the AAM's to point to which zone you would like the user redirected to.

Once that is done, then just add a link to your public web site to portal.arsprofessionals.com.

Also, if you're going to be exposing your SharePoint site to the public, you should probably also secure it with an SSL certificate (Add an https binding to the site(s) in IIS, forward port 443 and update the AAM's to specify https://. You should probably also redirect any http requests to https.).