Monday, November 17, 2003		Feature

The Intranet and Extranet
Priti Trikha

SAME technologies that are used to create publicly accessible Websites can be used to create an Intranet (an internal Website for communication and collaboration among employees) or Extranet (a secure external Website for communicating with vendors, buyers, or partners).

Increasingly, the Intranets are becoming integral to the infrastructure of many companies. They are much less expensive to build than private networks and can help streamline processes, procedures and the dissemination of information.

Intranets and Extranets often result in a fast and astonishingly high return on investment. The basic goal of the Intranets and the Extranets is to facilitate communication and workflow.

An Intranet is simply a Website created for the internal use of an organisation. It uses the same general technologies as the public Internet but is accessible only to the employees or authorised agents of the organization. The language used on the Intranet might differ from the language used to communicate with the public and sometimes the visual branding on the company’s public Website isn’t carried through as extensively on the Intranet. Users access the site with a Web browser just as they would a public Website. An Intranet is "protected" from the outside world by a firewall.

An Extranet, by contrast, is accessible to authorised offsite users, including individuals and organisations with whom the company does business. Only users who have been given a valid username and password can use the Extranet. Even then, some users might have their access limited to specific sections of the Extranet i.e. buyers might have access only to their own account information, sales representatives working in the field might have access to their accounts and receptionists logging in from home to check e-mail may skip accessing financial information.

The cost of creating an Intranet or Extranet can vary widely depending on the site’s purpose, the technologies used, and from which stage has it been built. If the Intranet or Extranet endeavour is more complex or if you have to build it from ground up (meaning that a back-end and a design have to be generated ), the development and implementation costs will be comparable to those of publicly accessible Website of the same size and complexity. The Intranet or Extranet will genuinely support or enhance the business. It should provide some combination of the following benefits:

• Better communication between users and the individuals and organisations.

• Reduction in paper work.

• Increase in loyalty of customers and business associates.

• Increase in sales resulting from faster access to information required to support and close a sale.

• Reduction in labour, production, or those costs resulting from the automation of every day functions.