The Extranet is an outsourced Intranet that is fully connected to the Internet through the Internet.

A bit of a mouthful, so let us explain...

Extranets use computers and the Internet to electronically link businesses, partners, and clients within a secure environment. An Extranet is an electronic linking medium -- such as WEB Servers, Email Servers and other TCP/IP services -- that combines an organization's Intranet with the Internet. In response to the exorbitant costs of private networks, businesses are now taking advantage of the power and feasibility of Extranets to collect and distribute critical information around the world.

Extranets, such as PLCom's News Services, are becoming the leading platform for turnkey E-Commerce services. These services are purchased on an outsourced basis so as to minimize an organization's risk and investment in IT infrastructure, thereby permitting the organization to focus on its core competence and maintain its competitive advantage. Why waste time and money in risky technology projects that your organization does not have the knowledge base to support?

Extranet applications are based on open Internet standards such as HTTP, TCP/IP, FTP, SMTP, HTML, MIME, X.500, X.509, SSL, etc. Through the use of these standard protocols, companies can interact and inter-operate with relative ease. Extranet applications are designed to be compatible with a complex environment that can utilize a wide variety of technologies, such as:

• web browsers and servers
• secure file transfer servers
• customer account management systems
• remote administration tools
• directory servers
• authentication systems
• commerce systems
• distributed computing infrastructures and databases
• messaging systems
• fire walls and proxies
• security scanners

Extranet technologies will give your company a cost-effective competitive advantage only if it is properly managed. PLCOM's dynamic Extranet Server Solutions are designed to meet the challenges of the ever-changing world of E-Commerce applications.