Website & Extranet Portals

Website Portals

Web portals, are Open to any user from any location, no authentication involved and also act as online gateway to a company’s sensitive and critical data, while allowing clients, customers, vendors, and business associates to access these virtual and private network services and information via a website login (web browser) authentication system. Such a system allows such external members to have secure, managed, remote access to a company’s internal network of critical data and services, giving the company’s clients, partners, and associates a strategic advantage in doing business with them.

Website & Extranet Portals

Extranet Portals

Extranets are used to carry out three principal purposes for an enterprise’s clients and business partners:

• Sharing data.

• Collaborating on projects.

• Communicating with pertinent parties.

Accessible to a limited audience usually worldwide but authentication is required. These people might be:

• Your staff.

• Your customers.

• Potential customers that you are trying to entice.

There are several situations in which an extranet would allow third parties to log in to a company’s extranet via a website login page, resulting in the third party having secure and managed access to crucial documents, applications, services, and data that may be needed for the completion of a project. Additionally, since extranet platforms are developed with specific applications and platform-based systems that are meant to link remote third parties with the company’s internal workings, robust communication mechanisms can be built into an extranet to ensure that project spreadsheets, documents, strategic plans, etc., can be edited, updated, managed, copied, secured, signed, and collaborated on by third parties and the associated enterprise with ease. Such a system also negates the need for companies to use much less efficient email systems when it comes to attaching files and collaborating on critical documents.

Project Extranets

Project Extranets are external networks specifically designed to revolve around corporate projects and large-scale operations. Such extranets are vital for managing all of the operational “moving parts” of a project while keeping the many different parties involved together under one collaborative umbrella. The core parts of project extranets are:

• Project Management tools.

• Cloud data synchronization.

• Project catalogs.

Logistic Extranets

Logistic extranets help companies manage the minute logistical operations and aspects of projects, workflows, operations, short-term tactical plan implementations, and long-term strategies. They have the basic features of any extranet - web portal access, authentication mechanisms, links with the company’s intranet data and network - while having specific features that allow it to benefit large scale e-commerce operations that require real-time updates and connections with distributors, manufacturers, and vendors.

Integration Extranets

Integration extranets are a generic type of extranet that allows companies to integrate internal enterprise suites and robust enterprise-level applications into a single extranet platform for collaboration between multiple relevant parties where data needs to be updated instantaneously. Such a system would benefit projects that need to connect many third parties with certain features and benefits.

• Shareholder agreement sharing and collaboration.

• EDI (Electronic Data Interchange).

• Communication-based collaboration platform functions (reminiscent of Slack).

There are several cases where a robust integration extranet would be highly valuable to a company, such as during a Merger & Acquisition project that needs to integrate many systems and third parties under a single umbrella.