October 13, 1998
Road map to the extranet
By David Strom
illustration by annie bisset
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Are you considering building an extranet? It's easy, to paraphrase sportswriter Red Smith: You just sit down and open a vein.
Fortunately, yours isn't the first company that's had to build one. There are numerous good extranets in the field, and a few that can serve as benchmarks for your efforts. Take a look at how Coopers & Lybrand built its Tax News Network (TNN), for instance, and you can spare yourself some spilled blood.
We've drawn you a map to give you a clear picture of how a typical extranet works. To get on the example extranet, point your browser at Taxnews, home of TNN. As the home page resolves on your screen, you are now cruising an extranet.
Extranets have been around for a while--as long as firewalls have existed. With an extranet, a company can freely participate on the World Wide Web; give employees access, via browsers, to internal databases while keeping the public out; and provide customers and suppliers with password-protected access to selected parts of the same data.
Good extranets are designed to be exquisitely simple from the users' point of view. But balancing the company's needs against the needs of all those users--that's where the bloodletting comes in (Red Smith's comment was about writing, a similarly "easy" undertaking). Before you build your own extranet, you'll need to answer some questions about your audience, purpose, and scope:
What's the niche? Is your extranet intended for executives, middle management, people in the trenches? Will the users be people you know well or don't know at all? People with whom you communicate often or infrequently? Will visitors to your site be customers? New prospects? Or is your purpose mainly to increase your company's ability to communicate with the rest of the world?
Coopers & Lybrand knew its audience: TNN began life as a service for corporate tax professionals, and Coopers has kept its focus on that niche market.
"Our typical member is in his or her mid-40s or older, and is a tax director at a Fortune 1,000 corporation," says Jack Teuber, Washington, D.C.-based director of TNN. "We don't get a lot of 25-year-olds living in New York City's Soho district and reading Salon magazine."
TNN's forerunner was an on-line service that Coopers introduced more than four years ago, and ran on DOS-based computers and dial-up modems. But with the Web explosion, says Susan O'Neill, director of Coopers' Knowledge Strategies Group, "it became clear that we had to move to a more robust platform. The Web was attractive because we could increase the access to TNN."
Join the club
Coopers & Lybrand has opened its TNN Web site to users at various levels and prices. Here's what each level provides and what each costs.
1. Unregistered public (free): Anyone can browse the home page, and a few links to Coopers research papers are active. Many of Coopers' tax publications, such as monographs and the "Tax Topics Advisory," are freely available as well.
2. Trial membership (free for the first 30 days): Visitors can register with a Web form. Once accepted, they have a month to browse a portion of the site, including news feeds and calendars. Trial members can't participate in discussions or view the TNN address book.
3. Memberships for the Tax Executives Institute and the Committee on State Taxation (free): Members of one of these tax associations can sign up for free access to the on-line portions of TNN that are specific to their associations. They also can sign up for full access to TNN for $432 a year, a 20% discount from the Platinum membership.
4. Gold membership ($240 a year): Coopers clients can sign up for access to the firm's private databases as well as access to other Coopers research sources. However, they don't have access to third-party information on TNN, such as external news feeds.
5. Platinum membership ($540 a year): These members have full access to the TNN site, its third-party data sources, discussion groups, address books, and stock-quote service. An additional $500 a year buys access to Coopers' "Tax Notes Today" service.
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Inexpert experts
In one respect, building an extranet differs from building any other network. All roads lead to the end user. This means the extranet should be designed so that users can access whatever they need without being conscious of the quirks and turnoffs along the way. While TNN's end users are experts, they're not experts in using the Web.
"These tax directors usually have the least amount of hands-on computer experience," O'Neill says. "When they began their careers, there wasn't much in the way of desktop computers. This means we have to provide a certain level of comfort and make our services easy to use."
Coopers wanted to create a one-stop information source for tax professionals and hoped the increased level of service would make Coopers stand out from the competition. "We have tried to be true to what the market of tax professionals has wanted, and also provide a single place for these people to turn to. We try to present a complete package," says O'Neill.
Deep but narrow
You'll have to decide how far you want your users to range through your data. This will determine what has to be connected to the extranet at the back end. In the case of TNN, the site had to be narrow but deep: It had to contain lots of content while remaining focused on specific areas relevant to corporate taxation. For example, information about general legislation regarding not-for-profit corporations is outside TNN's scope, but information on legislation dealing with corporate gifts to not-for-profits is very germane.
At the same time, Coopers made use of one of the Internet's strengths: integrating external--and in some cases competing--resources. "We have always included information from a wide range of information providers, such as Dow Jones," says O'Neill. This makes for a powerful combination of information, including the full text of various tax analyses, legislative tax codes, and business newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
TNN is a members-only site: To use it, visitors must fill out a Web form. Access to the site, via a user name and password, isn't granted until the application is approved by a Coopers staffer. An Informix database sitting on a Sun Solaris server manages the member data, including subscriber profiles and access rights. The purpose is to make sure the service reaches the intended users.
"Our subscribers are clients and potential clients, people with which we have other relationships," says Teuber. "This service is designed to enhance that relationship. We can't afford to be in a situation where we treat people automatically. We like to have a real feel for who are our subscribers."
You've done this before: setting up a business for specific types of customers. But on the Web, you have to offer options within the narrow world created for the user.
Flag down the traffic
Parts of TNN are open to the public, including a home page of news on corporate tax matters. This drives traffic to the site--and you can always use a lot of traffic at your home page, whether you're selling space for advertising banners or promoting the site itself by making it popular among Web users.
Coopers provides answers for a variety of users. And the information is layered, so that when the user arrives, he or she can select a membership option and then proceed down the right path.
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