Planning and Configuring Extranets in SharePoint 2010-Part 3 “The Environment”

I know quite a few people have been waiting for this post. In this post we’ll cover the environment itself, which I have made mention of in Part 1 of this series, and went through more of the configuration in during Part 2. I even made mention of it during my session at SharePoint Saturday Boston on the same subject. I have been extremely busy over the past two weeks with work, and finally had a chance today to finally put the finish touches and testing on the environment, and it is now ready for release.

I would like to thank the folks over at CloudShare for making this possible. If you are not familiar with them – well, they say it better than I can

“CloudShare makes it easy to build, manage and share any business application instantly and on-demand, in the cloud. Used by individual business and IT professionals, developers, consultants, teams and enterprises, CloudShare offers complete and easy cloud solutions for development and testing, migration, training, demos and proofs of concept. Its latest product, CloudShare ProPlus, enables users to quickly build SharePoint environments and access preconfigured production-grade SharePoint farms – no physical servers, installs, recoding or software licensing of any kind.“

So, what they have allowed me to do, is build up a demonstration environment, using CloudShare ProPlus, and using the SharePoint and Office 2010 Information Worker Virtual Image from Microsoft as a base (actual environment setup took about 5 minutes to do – and then it was just a simple matter of configuration. Then, after taking a snapshot of that environment, I can now share that environment out. Each and every person that uses the link will have their very own copy to use. Using the link provided below you will be required to register for CloudShare Pro Plus, as a 14-day trial account, which you can play around with the image as much as you want. If you like what you see, you can keep that going, even dumping this environment and creating your own, for just $49/month. You can then share out your environments with other if you’d like. This is really one of the best cloud SaaS solutions I’ve seen on the market to date.

So, with that – have at it!

[UPDATED – NEW LINK AS OF 9.25.11] http://go.gvaro.net/ExtranetsVM3

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know in the comments below.

More posts to come within this series as well!