An excerpt from Building An Extranet
Copyright © 1997 by Julie Bort and Bradley Felix. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Excerpt reprinted with permission.
By Julie Bort and Bradley Felix
What Differentiates an Extranet from an internal-Only Intranet and the Public Internet?
Models of Extranet Applications
Extranets are built in all sorts of ways using all sorts of methods, but they do
have a few elements in common. End users must be authenticated. This differs
from a basic password-protected Web site on the Internet in that, with Web
sites, few efforts are made to truly authenticate the identity of a person. One
example of this is Silicon Investor, a Web site dedicated to investors of high
technology companies (www.techstocks.com) . Silicon Investor requires a
password. The password is given through an HTML form and CGI script. This
form asks for information about the applicant such as the person's name,
occupation and e-mail address. Verification of the person's identity is through
e-mail. After the form is submitted, a password is e-mailed to the address given
in the form. If applicants are honest about their e-mail addresses, they will
become authorized users. However, applicants need not be honest about the
rest of their identity.
With an extranet, authenticated identity is important. Still, extranets can be
classified into the following models.
The secured Intranet access model
The specialized application model
The electronic commerce model (see Figures 1.1, 1.2, 1.3)
Figure 1.1 The secured intranet access model allows partIlers directly into the corporate
intranet, either through the Internet or via a direct, dial-up connection
Figure 1.2 With the specialized application model, the extranet is an application
developed specifically for partners that may also be part of the intranet.
The Secured Intranet Access Model
With the secured intranet access model of extranet application, the partner
gains the ability to log directly onto a company's intranet to perform specified
tasks. This requires the highest levels of security planning and also a lot of trust
in the partners. An example of the secured intranet would be offering an
extension of the collaborative software used on a corporate intranet to include
access to a partner.
Figure 1.3 The electronic commerce model uses electronic commerce techniques to
service a partner segment, including similar security architecture and transaction
processing.
The Specialized Application Model
In this model, an application has been developed specifically for a particular
partner, or for a category of partner in which only a few partners exist, such as
raw material suppliers. Employees may be able to access the application from
their intranet, but partners would have limited access to the intranet from this
extranet site, if any. There is a moderate amount of trust of the partners
because access is limited only to partners that the company knows well and
may include processes that are mission critical. An example of a specialized
application model would be an vendor bidding application in which the
company's core vendors can bid on supplying raw materials for the company's
manufacturing needs.
The Electronic Application Model
This method uses electronic commerce techniques to approach specific
partner segments. It may be used when the partners segment contains
hundreds of companies. It may involve commerce transactions, such as order
entry, or it may not. However, it is typically capable of transactionlike operations,
even if that transaction is not a sale. It implies limited trust toward the partners.
An illustration of this model would be a database set up for a company's
distribution channel or those partners that sell the company's products to
consumers. This would contain information that would not be available to the
public, such as wholesale pricing, incentive plans, and announcements of R&D
projects. It may also allow resellers to place orders electronically, using a
customer account number as payment information.
Related articles:
The politics of building an extranet
About the author:
Julie Bort is a full-time, professional freelance journalist who has covered technology for the last decade. She has published in a dozen countries on topics ranging from PC components to supercomputers, and virtually every issue in between. She currently writes for nearly a dozen computer trade magazines, including
InfoWorld, LANTimes, VARBusiness and Electronic Business. For the last four years, she has specialized in enterprise computing issues, specifically the impact of the Internet, intranets and extranets on the enterprise. She also speaks and consults. Her corporate clients include Microsoft, Oracle, Informix and On Technology.
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