Definition : Intranet is the generic term for a collection of private computer networks within an organization. An intranet uses network technologies as a tool to facilitate communication between people or workgroups to improve the data sharing capability and overall knowledge base of an organization's employees.
A common extension to intranets, called extranets, opens this firewall to provide controlled access to outsiders.

Definition : An extranet is a computer network that allows controlled access from the outside for specific business or educational purposes. Extranets are extensions to, or segments of, private intranet networks that have been built in many corporations for information sharing and ecommerce.

Most extranets use the Internet as the entry point for outsiders, a firewall configuration to limit access, and a secure protocol for authenticating users.

Intranets – For Easy Internal Communication

Intranets are business to employee (B2E) portals offering private network access to company employees and other workgroups. They allow better communication within your organization -- vertically and horizontally, saving time and increasing productivity. Intranets are corporate productivity tools that enable the sharing and distribution of various applications within an organization including documents, calendars, manuals, policies, programs, news, announcements, and more.



Extranets – Facilitate External Communication

Extranets are business to business (B2B) portals that ensure controlled and secure communication and information sharing to authenticated users through the internet. Furthermore, they allow improved collaboration, such as allowing employees in sales or marketing to communicate or update information regardless of their physical location. Extranets are mini internets, developed to be used within the confines of a business, including employees, clients, customers or suppliers.



Intranet and Extranet Benefits
· Improve communication with employees and partners.
· Improve business relationships with better collaboration.
· Reduce operational cost and time with electronic delivery of manuals and information.
· Easily and economically share information, news or documents.
· Connect across different platforms and file formats.
· Enhance employee and customer satisfaction and productivity.
· Extranets help share core business information regardless of the location.

What are the basic features of an Intranet?
- The basic intranet should allow your team to track their calendar and share documents.

Calendar Management - Your team members should be able to log into the intranet and see all of their appointments and to-do list items. Schedules should be viewable in a daily or monthly format and should be printable.

Document Sharing - Your intranet should also allow your team to create folders (similar to the way you do on your personal computer), and upload documents to those folders. Document sharing allows you to keep all your important company documents in a central place, and your employees can go to this area to get the documents they need. As documents are uploaded, you should be able to automatically send emails to colleagues alerting them that new documents are available on your intranet.

What are advanced features of an Intranet?
- The more advanced intranet allows deeper collaboration between team members:

Advanced Calendar Management - Not only should you be able to manage your own calendar, you should be able to arrange meetings with other team members, seeing when they are available for the meeting. Meeting notifications should be automatically sent via email, allowing team members to accept or decline meetings directly from their email.

Advanced Communications - Advanced intranets include the ability to create threaded discussion forums. For example, you may create a discussion forum for a specific project you are working on and sign people on your team up to use the discussion forum. As questions arise during your project, team members will post the question in the discuss forum. When posted, everyone signed up for the discussion forum is sent an email and the team member that knows the answer can reply to that email (everyone is alerted via email), allowing the discussions to be posted in the forum for future review and documentation.

Project Management - Advanced intranets also allows project managers to assign tasks and deliverables to their team members. Team members can update their percentage complete online, automatically notifying the project manager as things are updated. This way everyone on the team keeps informed as the project progresses. Project managers can also create weekly status reports directly from the task completion statuses.

Contact Management - Advanced intranets allow you to keep track of names, addresses, phone numbers and detailed notes for employees, clients, and vendors.

EXAMPLES OF EXTRANET APPLICATIONS

1) AMP CONNECTS BUSINESS CUSTOMERS TO SELL PARTS

AMP of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is a large electric-connectors distribution company with annual sales of over $5 billion, conducting business in 50 countries. The company sells nearly 80,000 different products, including fiber-optic connectors, printed wiring boards, splices, and switches. In 1996, AMP launched an extranetcalled AMP Connect, which is based on electronic catalogs with product descriptions, three-dimensional models, and comparative charts and tables of all its products. The company operates one of the most advanced portals. The information is available in eight languages, and the site receives 100,000 hits daily from approximately 15,000 business customers worldwide.

This application is an example of connecting a company with its customers through an extranet. AMP Connect is used to place orders and has given the company a forum for communicating with wholesalers, distributors, resellers, and customers,
which is necessary for the creation of an exchange.

2) GM CONNECTS DEALERS BY KIOSK

General Motors (GM) wanted to change the way automobiles are marketed by using an extranet accessed in kiosks and through PDAs. The interactive kiosks are installed in dealerships and shopping malls. The extranet uses the GM-access network, which connects 8,600 North American dealers with GM factories. GMaccessis implemented worldwide using the Pulsar satellite system, which is operated by Hughes Network Systems.

The goal is to link the interactive kiosks to GM’s legacy infrastructure. Ideally, kiosk information will be instantly updated whenever GM changes the configuration or price of a car.

3) VHA, INC., CONNECTS WITH SUPPLIERS FOR PROCUREMENT

VHA, Inc., an Irving,Texas, alliance of 18 hospitals and 1,400 health-care organizations, developed an extranet that supports collaboration and allows access to an electronic catalog of products for approximately 22,000 dial-up users. VHA members purchase more than $8 billion in products annually under contracts from 350 suppliers.

Initial use of VHA.com was for access to VHA health-care organizations and the Internet. Since 2000, VHA members have been able to buy and sell merchandise and offer a wide range of medical, legal, and pharmaceutical research capabilities. The extranet allows all VHA members to purchase directly from suppliers.

VHA.com enables all VHA members to exchange information through a ubiquitous, secure environment. VHA chose IBM as its ISP because of its experience with data networking. Security is a particularly important issue because of the sensitive nature of clinical information. Hospitals, clinics, home health companies, and managed care facilities in numerous locations are involved, and patient information must remain private.

4) CSX TECHNOLOGY TRACKS SHIPPING STATUS

In 1996, CSX Technology, a railroad company, developed a highly publicized intranet for tracking cross-country train shipments from point to point. The company expanded this intranet to an extranet, named TWSNet Premium, which links more than 200 freight shippers and forwarders. The extranet allows CSX customers to track shipments, initiate work orders, and view pricing data over the Internet. TWSNet Premium includes large suppliers of transportation services such as railroads, trucks, container ships, and barges. TWSNet Premium is also open to non-CSX customers who require Webbased solutions for managing inbound shipping or outbound delivery information as part of their supply chain management. The extranet allows tracking of shipments to the line-item level, simplifying identification of bottlenecks or problems. A global reporting system analyzes carrier performance and trends. It also allows users to perform precise demand forecasting, while a special programming interface enables integration with legacy systems.

Here's a couple extranets examples especially of interest to manufacturers and distributors:

The Big 3's Network

An extranet's primary benefit is in its ability to wring out costs in the supply chain. Extranets can help companies to finally realize the benefits of Just-In-Time (JIT) inventory systems, a goal that Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) failed to achieve. EDI fell short where it came to the product selection process. It worked well for order exchange and payment exchange, but offered nothing to support product selection problems. EDI was expensive to implement and did little for the smaller firms other than reduce the fears of losing business if EDI wasn't in place. Often, critical electronic data interchange (EDI) and computer-aided design and manufacturing and engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) file transfers are performed through several different communications protocols. Unless every company that wishes to participate in information sharing is able to handle these various protocols, the collaborative environment can't exist.

Today, the Big 3 automakers, Chrysler Corp., General Motors Corp., and Ford Motor Co. are building a collaborative extranet that links them to their suppliers through designated ISPs via a managed, virtual private network (VPN) called the Automotive Network eXchange (ANX). It's estimated to drive billions of dollars in costs from the supply chain. ANX replaces 50 to 100 direct dial connections to the automakers, reducing telecommunication cost up to 70%, but the real payoffs are in speeding and easing communications between suppliers and manufacturers. ANX will be used to electronically route product shipment schedules, order information, CAD files for product designs, purchase orders, and other financial information. The improved exchange of information should result in new business practices between vendors and manufacturers. "They'll be holding information rather than inventory" states Laura Migliore, a Chrysler Corp. process control specialist.

ANX is designed to be a single, secure network for electronic commerce and data transfer. It promises to alleviate the industry's chronic design cycle problems by allowing the Big Three to collaborate in real time with their suppliers over secured areas of the Internet. Upon its completion, portions of the ANX will theoretically enable simultaneous engineering using multiple workstations or graphics terminals to run finite element analysis software, solid modeling CAD packages or even high-speed prototyping with the fastest communications links. The network will provide the bandwidth required, not just for CAD/CAM but also for applications such as advanced videoconferencing and three-dimensional virtual reality design sessions. The new network is supposed to cut the cost of doing business, but more importantly, it will speed new automotive designs. Automakers have struggled with a five-year design cycle, and they want to knock that down to less than three years.

"ANX is the kind of network I think has enormous potential," said Doug Buchanan, senior specialist of applications development at Dofasco. Currently, Dofasco sends its steel parts designs to Ford via file transfer protocol. Ford does finite element analysis on the designs before transferring the data back to the steel supplier. With ANX, collaborative or interactive CAD is possible. "My perception is that most of the technology to collaboratively do CAD/CAM over networks is there. ANX will help facilitate that."

HOPS For The Web

Heineken USA began rolling out their Heineken Operational Planning System (HOPS) extranet last year to tighten the links between the brewer and its network of regional suppliers. With HOPS, resellers can log-in, place their monthly forecasts for sales and place product orders. "Now, beer from our brewery in Europe can make its way through the US retail channel in just about the same time it takes Anheuser-Busch to ship from its domestic breweries. We can react faster than ever before" states Heineken's vice-president Dan Tearno. By the end of Summer 1997, 80% of Heineken's sales will be integrated into HOPS. Heineken expects that investments in the system will be paid back within one year.