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Extranets: Killer App or Overblown Fluff?

Dr. Joel Orr

Using the World-Wide Web as a project bulletin board or switchboard sounds like a good idea—and it is. The greatest benefit of an extranet is that it cuts the number of links in the communication chains among all the participants in a project.

You’re the owner, and you have some special request involving the plumbing. You tell the architect. The architect communicates with the general contractor. The GC contacts the plumbing sub. What are the chances that your message arrived unchanged? Not very good. By the time it passed through a couple of phone calls and a fax machine, "Install hot water tap in external washtub" might have become, "Wash hot water tap in stalls."

With a proper extranet, every person can communicate with every person or functional role in a project. You don’t have to know the names of the sub-contractors. Every communication chain has only two links: From you to the extranet, and from the extranet to the person or function you are trying to reach.

What’s more, history is preserved. All communications are archived, in a form that cannot be edited. Just think: How many lawsuits could be avoided by the mere existence of an indisputable record of all project communications? One large builder was told by their attorney that just being able to retrieve all the project documents would save, at a minimum, tens of thousands of dollars on any project that resulted in litigation—just on the document assembly for the discovery process.

Picture having a single virtual location for all project documents, accessible from almost anywhere. No more questions about whether the concrete people got the latest version of the foundation drawings.

Question? RFIs (requests for information)? Everything flows through the extranet, so everyone knows who answered what, and when. People are less likely to file lawsuits when they know that all the parties have access to the same unchangeable record.

Clearly, extranets have the makings of a "killer app"—a computer program that fundamentally changes the way business is done. And the mad rush of companies to snag a piece of this market—82 when I last counted—is an indication that many people see extranets as the Next Big Thing.

So what’s not to like? Well, simply this: None of the extranets have any obvious special technical capabilities. None is as complex as a word processor or a spreadsheet. They all largely broker the built-in resources of the Web and its languages—html, Java, etc.—without adding much uniqueness.

I was contacted by a project architect at a major design/build firm. He had heard of extranets, and was trying to get his company interested in at least applying them to a pilot project. Nobody was interested, so he took his personal copy of Microsoft Office 2000 Premium, and used FrontPage 2000 to build a project web site—an extranet. Sure, it lacked some of the human interface frills of the commercial products. But all the basic functions were there, placing no special demands on FrontPage. And he had built it in a few short hours—including the time it took him to learn the rudiments of FrontPage.

In other words, an extranet can be a do-it-yourself project, and offer a great deal of value.

Mind you, that is not the path of choice. With numerous free extranet services available (see The List on EXTRANET WORLD, http://www.extranets.cc), there is no reason to expend even the small effort that my friend the architect put in on his pilot project. Try out Buzzaw.com, or iTeamwork.com, or eProject.com, or Bullwhip.com, or others. They are feature-rich, reasonably secure, and free. You will learn enough in trying one to have a much better understanding of what your real needs are than you did before.

Just building an extranet is not a tremendous feat of programming brilliance. The subtleties come into play when you match a specific set of work processes to a product. Can you have a hierarchy of managers? At what level of granularity can you assign read/write permissions? Are the fields in the forms customizable? How are calendars synchronized? Are there links to standards and to product catalogs? Can processes automatically notify participants at different stages?

One vendor, Framework Technologies, recently announced a proposal creation service. Instead of producing packages with reams of documents and poor indexing, you can have what amounts to a Web site that is a proposal, complete with suitable hypertext links throughout. By using their ActiveProject extranet software for this task, Framework enables users to maintain their individual and collective "brands," while preparing a bid that is far more readable and accessible than is otherwise possible.

Interesting tie-ins are being forged between extranet vendors and e-commerce sites, allowing participants to request bids for construction materials, for example, and to close purchasing deals within hours. On-line catalogs are becoming viable tools, often using sophisticated parametrics to represent families of products.

Conclusion

Extranets are indeed a "killer app." While it is possible to use generic tools to produce something that looks like an extranet, the commercial products have many subtleties that are not easily emulated.

In fact, none of the more than 80 products and services that I have examined qualify as "overblown fluff"; most of them represent careful efforts on the part of the vendor to solve a particular set of problems for users. However, what works well in one context may be clumsy in another. It is up to buyers to carefully define their needs, and match them to the appropriate extranet Look for distinctives in the vendors’ experiences, in their services, and in their success stories; the differences in the feature sets may be subtle.

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