SharePoint help

OK, I have a couple of questions I've been beating my head against a wall with.

These all relate to Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 running on MS Small Business Server 2003 (SP2).

1) My client would like to put a login box on his web page that will build the site URL (i.e https://portal.domain.tld:port/clients/clientid) and also pass the logon credentials to the server to log in. I read that WSS 2.0 does not support forms based login, and he's not sure about upgrading to 3.0.

Is there with WSS 2.0 to accomplish what he wants? If I can convince him to go to WSS 3.0 and implement forms-based login, will it accomplish what he's looking for?

2) If I can't accomplish what he wants in item 1, is there a way to design a main client page that when a client connects he/she will see some standard page with a link only to the site he/she has access to? If so, could it be done in SharePoint designer best?

3) When I add a user to a SharePoint site, I get a page to choose to have a standard, generic e-mail sent to the use with the url to his/her site. The problem is, the url always is to http://companyweb/... Where can I find the text of this message to customize it to contain the client's proper URL structure and any specific text the client wants on this.

Thanks. I've been googling and reading and never coming up with much that is helpful in answering the questions.

Mark Kirschner
Kirschner I.T. Services
Seattle, WA

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 does not support forms-based authentication. You cannot implement forms-based authentication for Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 Web sites.Forms-based authentication was not implemented in Windows SharePoint Services 2.0. Attempts to use forms-based authentication will result in many problems.Forms-based authentication is a type of ASP.NET-based authentication in which an unauthenticated user is redirected to an HTML form. When the user provides his or her credentials on the form, a cookie that contains a ticket is issued to the user. On subsequent logon requests, the system first checks the cookie to determine whether the user was already authenticated.

SharePoint is quite a secure bugger and requires that all the assemblies you use be marked as secure, this way it stops dodgy web parts from being installed onto the server.But when you write your own web part it will probably whinge about security when you start accessing other objects. For example I had problems accessing a SQL Server, this is because the System Data assembly isn’t by default secure so you have to add this onto the list of secure assemblies.

From all my research and reading, I pretty much knew that WSS 2.0 wouldn't handle this. Thanks for confirming that.

What about the other questions, specifically the third one?

Mark Kirschner
Kirschner I.T. Services
Seattle, WA