Simple integration between 2 sites

Question

Company A is a large corporation with a lot of internal systems, policies and resource issues. They have a significant problem with one of the sections of their site that is affecting their bottom line, however due to policies and other projects they are unable to fix this for one year.

They have hired company B to solve this problem for them. Company B works faster than company A and could produce a mini-site to solve the problem in a matter of weeks. The problem is, company A's IT policy requires that all pages be hosted on their servers, therefore a separate mini-site is not an option.

What are some other techniques that could be used, independent of technology, that would allow these pages / content could be integrated into the larger site? We have considered, and excluded the following options:

• iframe
• sub-domain hosted remotely
• sub-domain hosted locally

Answer 1

Attack the meaning of "their servers", it's ambiguous.

In the same situation I've simply got the company to buy an additional hosting account with their preferred provider for the agency I was working for to use. IT should be willing, provided they know about and can access the account, and the cost is minimal.

You can then buy an additional domain to use or push them in to a sub-domain. Actually buying the domain usually brings the IT team to it's senses. I used the telegraph.co.uk as a persuasive example. telegraph.co.uk and blogs.telegraph.co.uk are hosted separately for precisely this reason as are parts of nivea.co.uk and large sections of vodafone.co.uk

The important part is, that rather than a separate site the sub-site visually and navigationally fits in with the whole - the user experience should not be affected.

If an iframe isn't acceptable you could try a cross domain javascript, php, or aspx include - this is how parts of Nivea's site works.