Epok helps Volunteers of America protect their Microsoft SharePoint Extranet

Bethesda, Maryland - June 3, 2008 - Epok Inc today announced that it had delivered to Volunteers of America its Epok® Edition for Microsoft SharePoint and helped implement a secure extranet to serve VOA staff, clients and affiliates.

With Epok’s Federated Access Management software in place, VOA can now securely extend its SharePoint sites across to clients and affiliates as well as to local VOA personnel. VOA staff, in partnership with their IT department, now control authorization rights, leading to improved extranet flexibility, lower cost of operations, and stronger compliance and security.  By keeping client and affiliate identities separate from VOA’s corporate Active Directory, IT staff is better able to improve security and protect VOA’s information assets. Furthermore, the ability to delegate user provisioning to trusted partners in affiliate organizations will reduce provisioning costs and the associated burden for IT.

“As large numbers of public and private organizations look to share information and collaborate through Microsoft SharePoint with trusted partners, IT departments are being squeezed by the increased need to provision external users while improving security and compliance,” said Nigel Simmons, Vice President, Product Management, Epok Inc.  “Epok’s Edition for Microsoft SharePoint keeps site access control in the hands of the VOA business user even when those sites are being shared with clients and affiliates while increasing the organizations’ security and compliance posture.”

“We were struggling with how to securely bring outside users into our SharePoint 2007 sites without corrupting our corporate Active Directory.  Epok gave our enterprise a cost effective, scalable, easily managed extranet product for extending SharePoint 2007.”  Said Ron Nolte, IT Director, Volunteers of America.

VOA initially experimented with several approaches to extend access to external affiliates, including a home-grown Forms-based Authentication application. While the design and architecture of their proposed solution were based on sound principles, the execution turned out to be more complex than anticipated and did not meet their expectations from the standpoint of features supported, the functionality exposed and overall realized performance.  With Epok’s Edition for Microsoft SharePoint they were able to deliver a cost-effective and timely solution.

About Epok

Based in Bethesda, Maryland, Epok Inc. is a privately funded software company.  Epok’s Federated Access Management software lets organizations securely extend application access across organizational boundaries — within and between enterprises. Business users partner with IT staff to control authorization rights, leading to improved extranet flexibility, lower cost of operations, and stronger compliance and security. Epok Federated Access Management extends and increases the value of existing identity and access management systems, and through integrations with popular portals and web applications such as Microsoft SharePoint, Sun Java Portal Server and Documentum ECM, end-users can easily discover and access the information they need. For more information, please visit www.epok.net.

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