Intranet or Extranet?: The Wrong Question

A late comment on a nice post by Ted Schadler over at Forrester! Tom's post is about the emergence of extranet collaboration platforms and the issues it brings to companies.

This is a big trend and big companies are slowly moving their intranet to the extranet. But is this really what we need in our networked world. Is the dichotomy intranet-extranet correct? Isn't our world moving towards a much more mixed landscape, with a very small intranet and the rest is extranet (or should we call it internet)? Knowledge workers want to work on one platform (the internet) and decide which content they want to share with which audience. So, I write a blogpost and decide to share it with only my colleagues, or colleagues and partners, or with the world. I don't want to repost internal stuff on the extranet or the other way around. I want one transparent system to work securely: inside the organization, with partners and with the world.

Do you agree? Is this what knowledge workers want?

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Comments

  1. James DellowMarch 18, 2009 at 3:52 AM

    I have been thinking about the same thing! I'm not sure if people want or are ready for a completely transparent system, but the concepts of both intranet and extranet are rather limiting and misleading in their typical application.

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