Available approaches we can implement inside SharePoint Server 2013 On-Premises to allow external user (non-AD) to login and use our sites

Question

We have the following inside our sharepoint server 2013 enterprise on-premises:-

1. An enterprise Wiki Site collection, which have enterprise wiki sub-sites representing our customers.

2. Now, we want our customers' project managers to be able to access the sub-site representing their company to be able to read the wiki pages and edit them.

Now, of course, those project managers are not defined inside our AD, and they cannot access our network.

So, how can I allow external users to access our SharePoint On-Premises sites? Of course, I am not asking this question from a network perspectives, as our network team mentioned that using VPN external user can be permitted to access specific urls within our SharePoint intranet, but I am asking if SharePoint On-Premises 2013 provides some facilities to allow non-AD users to access the sites?

Second question: Now, when any wiki page is edited inside our sites, an email will be sent to a username named "Assigned to", so the user can approve/reject the changes. This email is being sent inside a SharePoint Designer's workflow 2010. Now, if we manage to allow external users to access our sites, then will the 2010 workflow support sending emails to external users?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can set up a variety of methods, e.g. FBA storing users in an LDAP database, SQL database, use SAML with a Fed-to-Fed trust, and so on.

None of these methods is necessarily easy to implement nor maintain. Using Active Directory is your best bet to a quick implementation and no additional configuration or ongoing maintenance.

If you assign an email address to the object, and your mail server allows you to relay, yes those approval emails would work. If not using AD, you'd have to come up with a process to import the defined email attribute.

Answer 2

You can use (sql server membership provider) to store external user credentials (ex: create for each of them a user name and password) and integrate this membership provider with your SharePoint site . For details steps for implementation, Refer to the below links :

• Configuring SharePoint 2013 Forms-Based Authentication with SQLMemberShipProvider at https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/ptsblog/2013/09/20/configuring-sharepoint-2013-forms-based-authentication-with-sqlmembershipprovider/
• Form based Authentication using SQL provider in SharePoint 2013 at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sharepoint__cloud/2012/12/16/form-based-authentication-using-sql-provider-in-sharepoint-2013/