Exchanging Information with Business Partners
The term extranet might sound intimidating, but it’s essentially what you’re setting up when you use Google Apps for your business data and you create a business account so someone outside your company can gain access to it. You might think of an extranet as being like an apartment or condo building with a doorman: only residents can get past the doorman, but they, in turn, can allow in other visitors to whom they give access.
An extranet works on the same principle: it can be viewed as part of a company’s internal network that is extended to users outside the company, whether they are mobile employees or suppliers. Participants keep their data safely behind a firewall, but authorized partners can access the information they need over the Internet.
You can think of your extranet as a set of private Web pages that you only let a special group of individuals access. Under normal circumstances, setting up an extranet would mean hiring IT consultants and using a mixture of leased lines, frame relay connections, and Web server security to admit outsiders to parts of your internal network. But for small- to mid-size companies looking to provide extranet access to perhaps ten to twenty employees, a Google Apps site will work just fine. Here are a few examples of what you can do on an extranet. You can:
- Securely place proposals or requests quotes online.
- Publish training information that applies to specific employees.
- Your employees can use the extranet to securely access parts of your database so they can personalize customer or vendor information.
When you give a business partner an account so they can use Google Apps, you give them the opportunity to create their own content. One of the more advanced technical functions of an extranet involves the creation of customized content in response to users’ needs. You might post an order form on Docs & Spreadsheets that you share with your partners; they can fill the form out to order products from you and without having to phone or e-mail you.
You can also post documents online that provide a ‘‘paper trail’’ so customers can check the status of their orders, or make note of delivery schedules on a Google Calendar you create just for them. This kind of personalization makes individuals feel in control and improves their level of satisfaction.