Intranets are widely understood to provide internal content to stakeholders such as staff message boards and HR resources. However, the technological foundation of the intranet system is providing an interface for many other business applications.

What is an intranet and extranet? An intranet or extranet is basically a private computer network based on technologies that use the internet. Or to put it another way, a private internet. Intranets generally refer to systems that are open only to members of an organisation such as staff, extranets usually refer to areas of the intranet open to associate members such as customers or suppliers.

Since the mid 90’s internet technologies that use internet protocol (IP) systems have grown in sophistication to the point where they can integrate with most other systems. This has provided an enormous amount of opportunity for companies and organisations to collaborate and communicate in ways that previously would have been unimaginable.

Intranets have grown in popularity due to 2 main forces;

• The need for organisations to make information only available to certain groups due to sensitivity or security of information, or just the commercial nature information.
• The need to cheaply and easily connect systems together, leading to some kind of over arching functionality. Intranets and extranets use standard web browsers so they can be accessed wherever there is an internet connection.

In their simplest forms intranets and extranets can be used to store company information or provide basic internal processes like holiday request forms. In more sophisticated forms intranets can combine business applications and add additional functionality to systems such as CRM sales systems, production and manufacturing systems, despatch and customer order tracking systems. The list is as least as long as the number of unique business processes in existence.

Some benefits of developing intranets/extranets:

• Intranets and extranets can be accessed anywhere there is an internet connection making an organisations data widely available globally.
• The cost of developing systems using web based architecture is much cheaper then building and distributing proprietary computer programs.
• Intranets and extranet functionality can extended easily over time to adapt to an organisations changing needs.
• They can usually integrate easily with existing systems to provide visibility that previously didn’t exist.
• They can extend functionality of existing systems without the need of a major rebuild.
• Data from existing systems can be aggregated to provide broader level of reporting across and organisation.

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