Document sharing and community forums are two of the more basic collaboration capabilities available via an organization's extranet. However, you should consider extending your collaboration capabilities with additional business-focused functionality:
- Reporting Dashboard or account information
- Product lookup information
- Guides and how-to's
- Marketing and featured promotions
- Self-service account requests
A corporation's public web site typically provides the extranet capabilities behind a secured login area, so it integrates seamlessly with the web site experience.
Security
By definition, since extranets contain sensitive or private content, security is a concern. As a result, security measures for extranets must be rigorous and trusted by all parties involved. Extranets which are hosted within your own network have the advantage that the repository of users (e.g., an Active Directory domain, or an LDAP repository, or a custom SQL server database) can more easily be exposed to the extranet/intranet site.
However, some organizations have external constraints requiring that applications are hosted externally, yet still need to connect to your company's user repository. This might add additional requirements for federated identity or perhaps a simple replication of the LDAP domain(s). Consider the even more complicated scenario where an extranet application is distributed not only in its user base but also in its hosting model. For example, an extranet between two companies where one company exposes its business data over a web service and both companies consume that web service within web applications hosted in both locations. This, too, brings about additional considerations such as web service security for consumption outside the internal network, additional trust boundaries by needing to combine Active Directory trees/forests, additional SSL certificates needed for securing transmission across multiple URL domains.
It's clear that the hosting model is as much a part of the planning process as the content model. What security constraints do you have? What are the roles and levels of security required? What auditing and record keeping capabilities are required? Do you or your business partners have other web applications which will require a single sign-on solution between a set of trust service providers?
Functionality and data
Extranets usually exist to expose valuable business or account data to a broader and external user base. What good is customer account data if the customers don't know their balance? What good is sales reporting data and detailed product information if the salespeople or business partners can't access it? The trepidation that many companies face is that the legacy data lives inside the legacy system.
Truth is most legacy systems or 3rd party applications do contain some API or export process to expose that data outside of its original interface. Furthermore, many content management systems contain hooks which let you define connectors to read data directly from your legacy source. Regardless, planning an extranet requires a clear definition of business and functional requirements, and you should consider those sources of data to be exposed and investigate options for connectivity.
Mobile
Today extranets also need to factor in mobile device access. This means either offering a mobile friendly version of the extranet site or an application to install on these devices. The approach taken largely depends on the nature of your user base, for salespeople who are frequently on the road and have company issued mobile phones; a mobile application installed on the phone makes sense. However, if your users are diverse set of business partners than a web based mobile friendly edition of the extranet is the better approach. In all mobile access to extranets is rapidly going from a "nice to have" feature to a baseline feature that users will expect.
Governance
Governance of an extranet is often less of an issue than intranets because content contribution is usually more centralized. Extranet users usually don't have as much power over the site structure and site content. The site structure and functionality developed as part of the initial site build is not subject to the same degree of "contamination" by external content contributors.
Want to lean more?
Find out how Acsys can help you get the most out of technology.
Set-up a 30-minute tech assessment now. Thank you for considering Acsys.