Question

I have an SP site where employees submit their reports. A report is submitted with Company information attached as metadata in a sharepoint library.

For a company there is a customer attached with a separate login in our AD and the customers all belongs to a separate user group.

I want to create a separate site where their customers can login and read their reports

My first problem is to share a library between sites so that the customers can access the reports submitted in our internal site.

Second problem is to create a connection between the company and the customer login so i can filter the reports so that the customer only sees their report.

How would you go about doing this?

Answer 1

If your goal is only to share reports then going with separate site for customer login or with site per customer is IMHO huge overkill and almost useless.

Solution to your problem is quite easy: One site with separate Document Library for each customer. There is not much difference between 1 customer = 1 site and 1 customer = 1 library except for simple scenario I found that maintaining multiple libraries on single site is much more easier then maintaining multiple sites with basically one library on it. However if you plan to have more interaction and ‘sharing’ with customers (now or in future) then separate site for each customer is a option.

Steps:

1. Define custom Document Content Type on site level holding all metadata your report needs
2. Create Document Library for each customer with this new content type
3. Define permissions on Document Library level – each customer can access only one designated library (need to have read rights on site)

Your employees need to upload report to customer library so that customer can see it. If permissions are set correctly then customer can see only designated library and you can easily set administrators (can see all) and superusers (can see more then one library/customer).

Having all reports in single site will simplify developing process for additional business logic by using custom workflows and/or receivers. Also searching and aggregation for administrator or super user is much easier.