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I'm new here, and I hope this isn't too much of a shopping question.

I'm the under-qualified director of technology at a small college that may be acquired by a larger school. We have Office 365 email and Office 2010 on our Windows 7 desktops. We have used AD with network drives for many years to manage all our department files, and it's worked well.

However, the larger school uses Google Apps and Drive, and we're now constantly getting requests for internal data. Today, for example, I found out with less than an hour's lead time that their marketing department wants to view all our marketing department's photos. That's about 400 GB sitting on a network share.

Is there any way to make external shares accessible? (With some controls, of course.) We're low on money, which is why we're likely being acquired, and I cannot buy a big boxed product. What I want to prevent is getting pushed into Google Apps overnight.

I suspect Sharepoint might be the answer. However, my predecessor tried MOSS 2007 and it was horrible. Are the newer versions better? Are there any other decent ways to do this? Shinier is better, because this is more about trying to not annoy a bunch of executives than anything else.

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  • Would a VPN between your companies work? It'd be slow, though. An external RDP session would likely work better.
    – Nathan C
    Commented Sep 30, 2014 at 16:13
  • How about a trust between the two forests, then limit access to the specific groups that need the access?
    – Davidw
    Commented Oct 1, 2014 at 4:59
  • @Davidw, would that be in addition to the VPN proposed by @NathanC? I could see that being a good long-term solution.
    – bendodge
    Commented Oct 1, 2014 at 15:47
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    Yes, you want to create a site to site VPN before establishing the trust.
    – Davidw
    Commented Oct 4, 2014 at 1:20

4 Answers 4

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My recommendation would be to create a trust over a site to site VPN between the two AD Forests, and use selective authentication to give the specific groups that need access to the information that they need.

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  • 1
    Today I received a similar request for mass-sharing photos, and I pointed the user to OneDrive for Business, which comes with our Office365 for Education subscription and offers 1 TB of storage per-user. With how fast Office365 has been changing, I'd barely noticed that Microsoft added it and no-one has been using it here (until now). In the long term, I will aim for Davidw's solution. Thanks, everyone!
    – bendodge
    Commented Oct 14, 2014 at 19:44
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One possible hack is to set up a Remote Desktop User that has access to the shares, then let the outside user RDP in and they can view them. That seems like would be the quickest and easiest for something that you won't be using long term.

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While there is some risk you could certainly install IIS on your file server and create 'web shares'. The web shares basically use webdav (http/https) to remotely access the filesystem.

It is really important to have your NTFS permissions set correctly, since you won't have the share-level permissions as an additional layer of protection. Also you really need SSL if this is going to be authenticated. Ideally this would be across a VPN, since you almost certainly want to protect that file server.

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FTP might be the simplest way to enable access web access for multiple people. It's easy to set up and configure, easy to secure, very efficient, map-able to a drive letter, and already included with IIS. The 'web shares' idea mentioned in one of the answers is good as well, but WebDAV can be ridiculously slow sometimes.

For information on securing IIS sites (FTP or otherwise), see this TechNet article.

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  • You can enable Windows authentication for the site with literally one checkbox. I'd call that pretty easy.
    – tfrederick74656
    Commented Oct 1, 2014 at 3:47
  • Except that the credentials fly over the Internet in plain text for everyone to see. That's definitely easy but not secure.
    – user186340
    Commented Oct 1, 2014 at 3:48
  • Only if you're using basic authentication. Windows authentication uses Kerberos. No plaintext passwords. IIS offers both, you can choose which to enable. Pull up the authentication page on any IIS instance and check it out.
    – tfrederick74656
    Commented Oct 1, 2014 at 3:50
  • @AndréDaniel For reference, see technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754628(v=ws.10).aspx
    – tfrederick74656
    Commented Oct 1, 2014 at 3:51
  • My bad, didn't know about that. Please edit your answer (add the reference link, some might find that useful) so I can remove my downvote.
    – user186340
    Commented Oct 1, 2014 at 3:53

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