With extranet portal, you can easily and effectively communicate and coordinate with people in your network, clients, vendors, and affiliates. Making internal company network accessible to public is putting your safety and security in risk.
Extranet portals allow users to maximize their communication ability by exchanging documents, information, ideas, and working on their project. Some of the tools, such as web mail or group calendar, are permitted, but with limitation, for users other than those working in the organization. Since it is a web-based service, extranet can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
Some of the sectors that adopt extranets for their organization include hospitals and health care companies find a great support from extranet since they can easily pull shared data, case studies, and research. By being able to control accessibility of users and reaching their clients or vendors, manufacturing companies will find it convenient to connect with their retailers and sale agents from anywhere in the world by sharing product brochure, customer inquiries, and samples from the extranet. Financial institutes are another example of organizations that could use extranet portals to manage real time data for brokers and to work on client accounts.
To set up extranet portal in your organization, you need to consider whether you prefer a hosted solution to an in-house setup where you need to have servers, software and IT management team.
Hosted solution can be a really simple choice as it requires none of software/hardware and management staff. Please be noted the basic purpose of extranets is to offer accessibility only to certain group of users from outside while blocking it to others. Hosted solution can also be a good option especially if your company has no specialists taking care of networks for security and firewall.
