This is a summary of the: Deploying SharePoint 2010 Extranets held by Chris Gideon,Judah Aspler and Luca Bandinelli at the SharePoint Conference 2009.

This session was almost a full house and you could feel the expectations in the air. I think however that many of the people got a bit disappointed because it was a quite thin presentation.

But to take the most important from it was that Microsoft promises that they do everything to make the extranet scenarios as seamless and transparent for the end users as possible. And the best of this is that in SharePoint 2010 it will be possible to have multiple authentication modes at the same zone. So you will be able to choose what type. It looked in the demo (one of the few, that they have quite a lot left to do. When demoing they came to this strange page with only a drop down stating, Windows or Forms authentication. Does your end users know what that is?)

In 2007 SP2 it was introduced something called Host Named Site collection (Anyone use it?) and that will exist in SharePoint 2010 as well.

So finally, and of course the authentication modes and set up can be handled with PowerShell commandlets.