Homepage only public page

Question

I have an external SharePoint site, say www.example.com.  It has windows authentication, both for local user accounts and AD. 

I want a main page available to everyone (public) when they type in www.example.com.  Then have a link to www.example.com/default.aspx, the main SharePoint page, which will require users to log in. 

I'm not sure how to do this. 

I used SharePoint Designer to create a default.htm file, and I added the following to the Web.Config for this SharePoint instance: 
...but no luck. 
Note: this worked if it wasn't the root directory, e.g. ~/FolderNm/default.htm

<location path="default.htm">

    <system.web>

      <authorization>

        <allow users="*" />

      </authorization>

    </system.web>

  </location>

Worse comes to worse, I'll need to create a new domain name and have the Sharepoint site use the second one. 

Brent.

Answer 1

Hi Brent,

I've done similar. You need to enable anonymous access on the site. The site I setup is www.nerac.us. We have the home page open to the public and a few web parts there as well. Then when you log in, you gain access to the other sub sites and lists.

You can enable Anonymous Access in Central Admin, then Application Management, then Authentication Providers. Pick your zone and check Enable anonymous access.

HTH

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David Lozzi
Delphi Technology Solutions
Blog  |  LinkedIn | Twitter

Answer 2

Thanks David!

I ended up going this route. 

I am now able to create pages and set them as Anonymous Access, but how do I set it for the Default.aspx page?

or should I go the "change Welcome Page" route, like this link
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointdevelopment/thread/0accba73-26d3-4374-83c6-998dadba3f4e

Answer 3

Well, I guess I can make the whole site have Anonymous Access, but that would mean the site Admin's would have to explicitly say that something is private, which is not ideal. 

Answer 4

What we did was setup the few lists that we wanted to share on the home page to be anonymous read-only. Everything else is restricted. If I put a restricted list on the home page it will deny the anonymous users access to that list.

We'll be doing the same in the next couple of days for another customer, I'll see how we do it more clearly then.

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David Lozzi
Delphi Technology Solutions
Blog  |  LinkedIn | Twitter