The Executive's Basic Guide to Intranets

5. What is an Extranet and How is it Different from an Intranet?

The extranet represents a bridge or more accurately, a "tunnel" between the public Internet and the private corporate intranet. As we have seen already, intranets are internal information systems based on Internet technology and are designed primarily for a closed-user group (i.e. employees). Extranets are really just ways in which an organization can extend its intranet by opening up and sharing parts of it directly with select customers, suppliers, and strategic business partners.

Although companies are at different stages of Internet and intranet usage, extranets can be viewed as the point of convergence, where the two merge. This is the point where companies can conduct transactions with both business partners and customers using the Internet. Examples of extranet applications include, but are not limited to:

	Groupware applications which a company uses with it's outside consultants and/or strategic partners to collaborate on a particular project or product they all use.
	Private newsgroups that strategic partners use to share ideas and discuss plans.
	Training programs (i.e. sales training) or other educational content that different companies develop and use in cooperation.
	Direct corporate purchasing from preferred vendors and suppliers.
	Linking the entire product supply chain --manufacturers, suppliers, dealers, off-site contractors and customers in whatever ways are most appropriate to a company's business processes.

Today,the amount of business done on the Internet over intranets is relatively small. In the coming years, however, that business is expected to grow significantly. The Internet may become one of the primary places that businesses operate --and is expected to be the place where many billions of dollars of goods and services will be bought and sold every year. Because of that, the ability to engage in electronic commerce is a vital part of any intranet.

Selling directly to consumers via the Web and enabling direct capture of order information as well as processing of the transaction (i.e. inventory fulfillment, order tracking, invoicing, and payment) is only one of the ways that business can be done with intranets. Many billions of dollars are also spent every year on business-to-business transactions in which businesses can directly communicate with each other from intranet to intranet, sending data and orders between them over the public Internet. Since much of the data that is exchanged this way is confidential, there needs to be some way of securing it from prying eyes. This is most often acomplished through the use of Virtual Private Networks or VPNs, a technology that allows intranets to use the Internet as if it were a private, secure communications channel.

VPN technology can be and is also used to create "virtual" intranets for companies that can link remote office branches over the Internet, while ensuring that the data that passes between them can't be seen by anyone except the people who have authorized access to the "virtual" intranet.

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