How Do You Authenticate Your Content Authors In Your MOSS for Internet Site, How Do You License Them, and Why Is This Issue So Confusing?

Why, Why, Why is this scenario so confusing to so many? 

Oh, I know. 

It’s because the documentation surrounding this issue is neither abundant nor clear.

What follows is one simple scenario for managing authentication of Content Authors for your MOSS for Internet Site, both from an architecture and a MOSS licensing perspective.

Assumptions:

1) Your MOSS for Internet Sites (MOSS FIS) site is a web content publishing site (a la Microsoft CMS 2002) used solely for providing anonymous access to read the content.  A prime example might be your company’s public http://www… web site.

2) You do not want to share the same servers for authenticated content consumption, such as if you were trying to use the same running instance of SharePoint for your intranet portal.  (That’s what I meant by “solely” in # 1 above)

3) You do want to have your content authors create their content within the actual production environment, rather than use a multi-step publishing process that involves a Staging and/or other non-production farm(s).  This may not be advisable in your case, but it makes for a simplified example here, and, let’s face it, it’s my blog, and I can do what I want.  If you are still stuck, add a comment, and we’ll talk further.

4) You do want to be certain that only authenticated and privileged individuals can author content.

 

Okay.  Here’s what you do:

A) You license MOSS FIS for the server(s) that run the WFE and App Server tiers of your farm.

B) You leverage AD for authentication of your content authors

C) You buy just the server license(s) for MOSS FIS, no CALs, because none are required for content authors who are publishing strictly for anonymous consumption.  Yes, even though you are using AD to authenticate your content authors, no CALs are required.  They are covered by the MOSS FIS licenses.

And, voila, you’re done.

Obviously, I haven’t addressed licensing of other components such as the Windows Server licenses, the SQL Server licenses, etc., but I have the luxury of saying here that those pieces are out of scope for this post.

If you want to talk about other configurations or scenarios, feel free to add a comment.