Making Portals Publicly Accessible

 

One of the largest advantages to Arena is the opportunity to have all three portals publicly accessible, using Arena’s security to secure pages and modules for each user. At initial installation, all three portals are available while ‘on campus.’ At installation if unique URLs were not configured for the different portals, you and your staff can access each portal by adding the portal ID# to the URL, as shown below.

http://arena/default.aspx?portal=1 (staff portal)

http://arena/default.aspx?portal=2 (member portal)

http://arena/default.aspx?portal=3 (mobile portal)

http://arena/default.aspx?portal=4 (donation kiosk portal)

In order for any portal to be available off campus, you and your network/IT staff will need to configure each portal accordingly. Use the below checklist for your network/IT staff to configure the respective portals.

The below checklist is a guide for the applicable staff/contract person so allow enough time for the respective staff to familiarize themselves with the steps on this checklist and research any step where the person is not familiar.

1.          Determine what subdomain to use for each portal. It is common practice to use something simple like e.g., my.church.org for the member portal and m.church.org for the mobile portal.

2.          Update external DNS to point the subdomain (e.g., my.church.org) to a public facing IP address.

3.          Update internal DNS to point the subdomain (e.g., my.church.org) to an internal server IP address

4.          Update firewall/router to allow the HTTP/HTTPS traffic from public facing IP address to the internal server IP address (DNAT rule)

5.          Optionally, update firewall/router to send outbound traffic from Arena web server on specific public facing IP address (MASQ rule).

6.          Update IIS (Edit Bindings) to have host names linked to Arena site.

7.          Update the Default Domain for the respective portal on the Portal List page in Arena to have host names linked to portals.