Do I need a Multisite?

  • Hello everyone,

    I am a SysAdmin developing two websites for the healthcare provider that I work for. One of the sites will be our main, public-facing site, and our clients will be able to log into it. The other is a corporate Intranet, which is protected by a SAML federated login.

    I would like to be able to do the following:
    – Share my Wiki between both sites (on a per-article basis).
    – Set up Cometchat so that users on the public site may receive support from users on the Intranet.
    – Share posts and comments between sites.
    – Allow differing domains; i.e. ‘www.foo.com’ and ‘www.bar.com’.
    – I also want to disallow anyone that logs in on the public site from automatically logging into the Intranet. However, in the reverse, I’d like this to work.

    Is this wishful thinking, or does this sound plausible with Multisite? Am I in for a world of headache, like so many online sources suggest?

    Or are there other ways of doing these things without a Multisite?

    Thanks in advance for any advice.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • yeah you know…

    don’t do that..

    don’t expose your intranet site to users outside .. i mean really man you are developing for a healthcare system ..

    but anyway if it was for something else

    Yes you can use the function “switch to blog” to grab posts from another site.. however you should really look into another method security should be your first concern here and wordpress is definitely not up to the standards of hipaa or anything else you should be protecting.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    I’m breaking my vow on never answering these questions…

    DO NOT put your intranet and your extranet on the same Multisite. Ever.

    Heck, for HIPPA, don’t even put ’em on the same server.

    Thread Starter Roquefort

    (@roquefort)

    Well, the Intranet is more of an internal CMS. There is not any PHI, as our billing system/EMR is entirely separate.

    The SAML authentication enforces policies which 1) Require the user to have a domain account and 2) require the use of a one-time password to login. It’s two-factor authentication. Every page is redirected to an SSO portal, nothing is indexed by Google because of this except for that portal. And of course it’s protected by SSL, downloads are disabled, etc. In my estimation, this is pretty secure.

    I’m well aware of the security concerns regarding HIPAA and I would not even consider doing this if I wasn’t certain that we could meet a high level of security.

    The unfortunate truth is that our business model necessitates that this CMS/Intranet must be publicly accessible, as our physicians bounce around between hundreds of hospitals, and the public computers/cell phones that they use will not be able to connect to our VPN.

    Thread Starter Roquefort

    (@roquefort)

    @ipstenu This is you?

    You make some interesting points, definitely. But I’m still not convinced that this won’t work for me. My thoughts are that with the the proper capabilities management, security (like two-factor), monitoring, auditing, and (most importantly) competent developers, this can be as secure or insecure as I need it to be. It may just be a little more complicated to set up.

    Ultimately, integration between the two sites is going to be very important to us in years to come, and I’d really prefer to do this right now so that I’m not hacking together a Multisite years down the road.

    Also, as a SysAdmin, I feel like maybe I have a leg up on security, since I have the option to use other forms of it like VLAN’s, domain authentication, firewall restrictions, etc.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    Yes, that’s me.

    I didn’t say it ‘won’t’ work. I nearly never say that. I usually say “You shouldn’t.”

    CAN yes. Should? Maybe. Multisite won’t be happy if it can’t cross authenticate due to your firewall. Technical issues will only be found by trying, though. It’s uncharted territory.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • The topic ‘Do I need a Multisite?’ is closed to new replies.