Whale Competitive Differentiation - Microsoft SharePoint®

This thumbnail value story highlights a key capability Whale Communications believes significantly differentiates its SSL VPN gateway from other vendors' products.

One of Whale’s most notable technology achievements is its distinctive support of SharePoint Web Parts, which are based on Web services. Unlike other products, the Whale SSL VPN gateway enables users to fully collaborate on documents without the requirement to either download any SSL agent to the client device or open a risky network-level connection from devices not managed by the organization.

SSL VPN gateways are a perfect choice for Microsoft SharePoint® Portal Server implementations that need to be accessed remotely, either by employees who require access to the company intranet from anywhere or by customers and partners who use a company extranet. SharePoint, as a Web application, is expected to work transparently with any Web proxy without a need to download any software component to the client. However, in practice, full document collaboration is denied when trying to access SharePoint through an SSL VPN tool acting as a Web proxy. This is because the client-side Web Services component of Office 2003 does not recognize SSL VPN authentication, an attribute that was implemented by Microsoft as part of the Web Services technology design. This behavior was found to be common to all SSL VPN tools working as a Web proxy. The practical result is that the SSL VPN gateway rejects Web Services requests as unauthenticated, and prevents document collaboration.

The only way that SSL VPN vendors have been able to allow Web Services access to SharePoint has been to open a network-level connection. This practice can only be used from controlled PCs that enable the installation of the network-level connection component, usually by downloading an ActiveX control. The use of ActiveX component means that access will be enabled from Windows and Internet Explorer environment only.

Whale, with its Intelligent Application Gateway incorporating SSL VPN, application firewall and endpoint security capabilities, is the only vendor who has designed an offering specifically designed for secure remote access to SharePoint from anywhere. One of Whale’s most notable technology achievements is its distinctive support of Web Parts, which are based on Web services, allowing full document collaboration without download of any component to the client device and without opening a risky network-level connection from public machines not managed by the organization.

Customer endorsement of this claim: Peter Greco, CIO of Colorado-based Regis University: “We adopted SharePoint as our portal of choice for its robustness. However, extending access to it from any web-browser was cumbersome. We looked at a number of solutions before selecting Whale’s SSL VPN. Whale was the only vendor we found that was able to provide access as it was intended – on the application level – without having to resort to potentially insecure lower-layer tunneling. With Whale we have much more freedom and flexibility.”

Other advanced functionalities of Whale's support for SharePoint Extranet:

• Extends SharePoint capabilities beyond just Web applications, transforming SharePoint into a single point of entry to all corporate applications including non-web client/server applications such as Native Outlook.


• Uses SharePoint portal as the homepage for remote access instead of the built-in SSL VPN portal page, while embedding the SSL VPN object as Web Parts in the SharePoint page.


• High level of integration with Active Directory allows password changing from SharePoint


• Remote SharePoint security features – application firewalling, secure logoff, cleaning specific SharePoint cache at the end of the session

To learn more about how the Whale Intelligent Application Gateway appliance can work in your SharePoint Portal Server environment, you can obtain a white paper on this topic or contact Whale at info@whale-com.com To learn more about the more general value of application logic in SSL VPN gateways read the interview with Noam Ben-Yochanan.