Microsoft® SharePoint® Designer 2010 Unleashed

Extending Web Applications

By extending a Web application, you can make content associated with the Web application available to new zones using different authentication protocols and different URLs. A key use of this is where you choose to extend an existing Web application to the DMZ so that external partners can access content. Another popular use of extending Web applications is where you have the core Web application set to the internal (or intranet) zone and then extend it to the external zone as the Internet site. In other words, you update content only on the internal site but make the external site a copy of the internal site with read only permissions. Zones include default, intranet, internet, custom, and extranet. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261698.aspx ...