Building an intranet portal where internal employees can share information, document, and content or collaborate in projects is one of the most common solutions almost companies have deployed these days. However, one of the most advantageous features of SharePoint’s extranet functions is the ability for businesses to collaborate with clients and customers in addition to internal communication. SharePoint’s seamless extranet set-up for user interactions allow outside parties to participate through an intuitive external set-up.
What exactly is an extranet?
Basically put, an extranet is a computer network that allows carefully controlled access of an outside party into any business’ private intranet. In other words, an extranet can be regarded as an extension of an entity’s personal internet. Administrators and intranet contributors can pretty much assign permission levels and viewing privileges towards other external organizations. An extranet is part of SharePoint’s versatile library of functions as it fosters adequate communication between businesses.
According to Wikipedia, an extranet is a computer network that allows controlled access from the outside, for specific business or educational purposes. In a business-to-business context, an extranet can be viewed as an extension of an organization’s intranet that is extended to users outside the organization,usually partners, vendors, and suppliers, in isolation from all other Internet users. In contrast, business-to-consumer models involve known servers or one or more companies, communicating with previously unknown consumer users.
To illustrate this with an example, lets imagine that your business manufactures furniture. Due to this service, you’re in need of an informative way to keep clients up-to-date with their product’s development. Lets say that without this, you encounter the difficulties of many phone calls from customers requesting updates of the product’s status.
Imagine setting up a SharePoint site that would allow customers to communicate with all production departments directly. Bob for example, could take a picture of a preferred material or color, send it to those involved with design and upholstery, before receiving a report back as to how the sofa is coming along. Customers can then approve and comment upon real-time updates of their purchased goods. This simple outline of a SharePoint extranet workflow shows how accounting headaches such as product returns can be avoided through appropriate business-to-client collaboration. Through utilizing a method such as this, clients are ones doing the approval; a much more customer satisfactory oriented process.
By creating such an extranet environment like the above ideally, you give your customers a collaborative way and self-service access for both to work together. This helps your company reduce work load, transaction between many different applications.
Why SharePoint for extranet collaboration?
SharePoint unquestionably is the most common chosen platform for internal employees collaborating to through its capabilities. It however can help maximize business productivity and provide greater efficiencies in collaboration side.
In the consideration of improving communication and business relationship, SharePoint is positioned as a powerful platform for extranet collaboration. There are many benefits of SharePoint extranet collaboration but this always depends on which kinds of applications specifically SharePoint is acting as. For example, your company is manufacturing cars with many partners who are responsible for producing component for cars,e.g., car engine, wheel, glass or so on. When the new version of a car is initially sketched out, the engineers at the partner sides have to review the blue-print of the new product to evaluate and send feedback to the production team. Imagine if you don’t have any system, engineers would have to work through email and you will get tons of emails once new product be produced. Additionally, there is no way to manage version of document when engineers put further comments or edit something. By using SharePoint and expanding it to the engineers, your partners can work with you very quickly so they don’t need to send email or come to your office. They can open document or access to information of the product regardless of where they are. After finalized, a new product needs to be evaluated and approved by your customer through SharePoint.
One of the real-world cases is the Microsoft Partner Portal website based SharePoint platform. Microsoft certified partners can log into to create and update their profile and associate Microsoft certification to their employees to promote the partner level.
Just in summary, here are the major benefits of SharePoint’s extranet features:
- Interaction with customers, partners, and suppliers.
- Providing self-service solution for customers.
- Improvement of public relations.
- Expansion of remote employee and customer collaboration.
- Ultimate client satisfaction!!
-T.s