I am a new hire into an existing business as I.T. I know the networking, I know the computers. The owner now wants me to learn Sharepoint among some other things. They currently use WSS 3.0. I have been reading up on this for the last month. I think I am ready to extend the current site to make it an Internet site so the employees can login. Some other things we would like to do I have read up on and it looks like they can be done, things such as inventory tracking in collaboration with QuickBooks and creating a website / portal for clients to have a unique login on and can see the status of their jobs in custom SharePoint lists. As far as I can tell the clients need an AD account. However, apart from that I am not sure what to do. A little background. The company has multiple clients, and we ship things out daily to those clients. We use Sharepoint to track the status of the jobs as they progress through the stages ultimately going to delivery. There is one common page that lists all the jobs by all clients that is updated constantly. We would like to allow multiple (different) clients/logins and have a page customized for each client. For example, you are a client and go to www.companyname.com/sharepointsite.html. From there you would get to a portal page with a login. Once logged in you will be presented with the Sharepoint job list. However, the list would be customized to your login, hence showing you only your jobs and not jobs of another client. I have been looking into portal sites, extending sites to the Internet zone, using IIS to create a link to the Sharepoint site. Getting everyone setup with a VPN and allowing it that way. I am just not sure which end to start looking at to accomplish these things the best way possible. I was looking into Sharepoint 2010 and how this may be easier to do, but our server is running 32-bit and because of other things it is doing it would be a nightmare to upgrade, so this is not an option. We have our own web server sitting here doing nothing, as well as a company website that is hosted by a 3rd party. I could use either. /I have html experience, little c++, java, scripting knowledge. I need to know where to start for this undertaking. Windows Server 2003 R2, Wss 3.0. I do have a copy of Sharepoint Portal Server available if I need it.

Thank you for the reply and all the information. I am working on wading through all this. I think I may just create a new site for the Internet facing page pointing to the database for the clients, rather than using the current app.