We know that SharePoint allows users to log in using Windows Authentication (i.e. their network login). What if we would like to provide a login to our site to allow users from outside the network to log in? This is a very common requirement, yet with SharePoint 2003, it proved highly problematic because there was no out-of-the-box alternative and the workarounds that programmers came up with had undesirable side effects.

The good news is that with SharePoint 2007, we can specify the Membership Provider that we would like our site to use. As you will see, implementing this functionality still requires a fair amount of configuring the various servers in our farm, but the solution we end up with is more elegant than it was with SharePoint 2003.

We are going to use the AspNetSqlMembershipProvider in conjunction with the ready-made ASP.NET Login controls to allow our users to create and use a username and password. This login will be stored in our SQL Server database as...