INTRANETS AND EXTRANETS

Intranets and Extranets

According to Mack et al (2001) Internet technology is also used within an organization and its business partners by creating an Intranet and Extranet. An Intranet is an organization’s private Internet that enables employees to share information and access corporate data. An Extranet is also a private Internet, but it is used to link business partners, such as key vendors, and to track orders, sales, and other information typically exchanged by business partners.

The term Intranet is used to describe Internet technology used on a local area network to provide e-mail, Web pages, and other communication methods to employees. Employees use the same browser used to access the Internet to access the company’s Intranet.

However, anyone who is not connected to the organization’s local area network is unable to access the Intranets are used to distribute employee information, provide Web page-based forms that are completed online, and give authorized employees access to data stored in the organization’s databases.

An Extranet is frequently used to link business partners, such as suppliers, vendors, and trading partners, who conduct frequent business transactions with an organization.

Importance of Intranet and Extranet in corporate communication

Charles (2007, pp. 11-19) sees successful corporate communication as a goal-oriented function requiring both communication knowhow, knowledge of business and language skills. As suggested by her, communication knowhow is an essential component of business knowhow, and by improving communications, employees sharpen the competitive edge of their companies. Accordingly, as argued by Trkman and Trkman (2009, p. 1087), companies need efficient and reliable ways of communicating and transferring information and knowledge among their employees.

Charles (2009) explain the following importance of intranet and extranet

It improves morale and foster goodwill between employees and management, that means through the use of intranet and extranet, it improve morale of the employees and develop goodwill between the employees and management.

It informs employees about internal changes that mean the employees are able to receive different information. Whereby the management can decide to inform the employees by communicating through intranet.

It increase employee understanding of the company and its products and services, organization, ethics, culture, and external environment

It encourage employee participation, are all played by today’s intranets, thus leaving a minor importance to other internal communication channels, such as personnel magazines, face-to-face meetings or e-mails.

Through intranet it enables employees to share information, collaborate, and improve their communications. That mean through the use of intranet the employees or publics are able to share their information and make decision in some of the communication activities practiced in the organization

Through extranet it enables your business to communicate and collaborate more effectively with selected business partners, suppliers and customers. An extranet can play an important role in enhancing business relationships and improving supply chain management.

It Improve productivity .According to Mack et al.(2001) an intranet with a knowledge portal can provide a single point of access to distributed on-line in-formation, coupled with advanced search capabilities and organizing schemes. This allows knowledge workers to then gather information relevant to the task, organize it, search it, analyze it, synthesize solutions with respect to specific task goals, and then share and distribute what has been learned with other knowledge workers.

By Mkula Dennis