transitbus, that's not really true.
You can configure anonymous access. To do this, you first have to enable it in IIS on the Directory Security dialog in IIS Administration for the site. After you do that, then you can click on Site Settings for your site. In the Administration section, click on "Go to Site Administration." Then under "Users and Permissions" click "Manage anonymous access." Here you can define the types of pages that an anonymous user can access (such as Lists and Libraries). If all the radio buttons are grayed-out except "Nothing" then you forgot to enable anonymous access in IIS first. After you configure this option, you can further define anonymous user permissions at the List/Library level. For any given List, you can give anonymous users read-only or update access.
Anonymous access is suitable for a public site, but there are also semi-public sites which are not quite private but not quite public either (e.g. extranets). For these scenarios (as well as for hosting services), Windows SharePoint Services provides a security delegation model. For example, your company may be a vendor or customer of mine. I could create a subsite of our SharePoint site which is dedicated to helping our companies collaborate. I can manage all the users on my side, but I really don't want to create/update/disable/reset user accounts for people on your side. SharePoint lets me delegate authority to you so that you can administer users and permissions within your subsite, without letting you access the parent site or any other subsites I might have created for other business partners. I can configure SharePoint to perform limited Active Directory user administration on your behalf, so you can create users which actually exist in my domain without you having domain administration rights, or I can configure it so that your changes are batched up, until I can review them.
SharePoint is a superset of FP Server Extension functionality, so it doesn't matter that FPSE won't work with SharePoint. SharePoint essentially upgrades FPSE, so there's no need to keep the old version.
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