Internet, Intranets and Extranets - What are all these nets?
By John LefevreWhile most people today are familiar with the internet, when it comes to the words intranet and extranet confusion still exists. Despite Wikipedia claiming the first intranets began appearing in the early 1990s, they were in fact in existence earlier than this – though in most basic form and without the sexy look and functionality available today.
To put it in its simplest terms, an Intranet is a private network inside an enterprise that generally interlinks company staff and stakeholders through a local area network (LAN) thereby providing access to the corporate knowledge pool.
While early intranet implementations were crude, text-based systems, today’s systems sport the graphical user interfaces people are used to with modern operating systems and generally provide access using Web 2.0 technologies from behind a security firewall.
Today, an enterprise-wide intranet is a vital, cost-saving necessity for anything but the smallest of businesses, providing everyone from the CEO down with access vital for the efficient running of departments and the organization as a whole. It is also becoming increasingly important that Intranets can function as a means to enhance communications in an organization through the use of blogs, forums, chat rooms, private messaging, and the like.
Many organizations also provide access to parts of their intranet to customers, suppliers or other people not directly employed by the company. Intranet systems are also being used to now span broad geographic areas and reach across the globe. Systems that provide this level of access are termed an Extranet and when properly implemented provide a secure and efficient way for companies to interact with a wide user group across a broad area by setting up the system on Internet servers and controlling access through password encryption. Extranet systems are very effective for keeping people well connected through essentially instant information sharing capabilities and communications.
