Concept in Definition ABC

The digitization of companies has led them to offer services and facilities to work with them through Internet to customers, but also to suppliers, partners (partners) or third parties with whom they work.

The most popular way of offering these services is through an extranet, consisting of offering these services over the Internet.

As its name already suggests, the extranet is an “external” network, which connects the internal management systems of the company and its intranet (the internal network used by workers) with those external agents with whom the organization must work, whether they are clients or suppliers.

The typical example of an extranet is the various services that service and product providers provide on-line to his clients,

which may consist of a Catalogue with shopping cart and electronic payment method, catalogs and material of marketing, technical and exploded manuals, or even training.

Speaking of this last aspect, training, another typical example of an extranet would be one that allows an educational entity to offer courses and training materials to its students. In this case, the teachers and administrative staff of the

institution They would also have access to an intranet for the internal management of the entity, but that would be different from the extranet for students.

The extranet is somehow connected to the corporate intranet, although both spaces are differentiated in a logical and practical way

The reason is that those who work on the intranet also have to work with requests from the extranet, feed the content available on it and manage it.

Another characteristic of the extranet, this at a technical level, is that it uses standardized protocols and tools

As the protocol IP and the language of HTML marks, since it operates on the public Internet network (eventually, any public network, although more than 99.99% of the extranets do it over the Internet), so you must work with the same tools used in the communication.

The existence of an extranet makes working with clients more flexible, since it allows self-provision of services.

Access by external users occurs through an access gateway named after Username and password.

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