Need help for creating sharepoint sites for both internet and intranet users

Question

We would like to know what is the best approach to create SharePoint sites for our customers(internet users) and internal employees(intranet users) on the same SharePoint server. Here is the scenario:
1) A customer posts a document from internet.
2) This triggers a approval workflow that can only be accessed and executed in the intranet environment. This approval process requires approval's possible modifications to the customer's document.
3) We would like the customer not to able to check the approval state and the modified document until the document is fully approved and finalized.
We are pondering if we need to create two sites, one site for customer and the other site is for internal approvers. Or one site is possible. It also looks like we need to somehow copy customer's original document to intranet site and triggers the workflow.
Any design ideas are helpful. Thank you advance!

Answer 1

Hi Jason,
Though it is perfectly possible to have both intranet and internet on the server, it is not a recommended practice. Having both on the same server would have multiple problems, instead me detailing it out, here is a forum thread on which Trevor had given
enough reasons -
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/9b550c33-6f5f-4cd9-8762-8ff389b747d9/sharepoint-2013-one-farm-to-host-intranet-extranet-internet?forum=sharepointadmin
If you have valid reason to go with single server, then you can also explore email enabled lists as one option and another one would be using custom sharepoint designer workflow.
you can also try using event receivers to send documents to intranet site from internet site, process everything and update the document in the internet site.
Hope this helps!
Ram - SharePoint Architect
Blog - SharePointDeveloper.in
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