When organizations want to collaborate with external partners or customers, they often think of using custom extranet sites. In the past, however, this has presented a significant challenge.
Bringing external users into your company’s on-premises SharePoint platform, for example, is a costly venture. Creating extranet sites with the on-premises platform can require additional networking considerations, hardware and perhaps additional licensing fees. And if these sites prove difficult to use, external customers or partners might not even go to the trouble of logging in. There goes your technology investment!
So what’s the best way to take advantage of this new functionality?
Lots of organizations need to facilitate ongoing collaboration and interaction with external partners — outside companies or individuals who work with their business. In those types of relationships, external sites offer a secure environment to share documentation and content as well as manage projects. A good place for organizations to start is by setting up a site collection that you intend to be outward facing, and configuring security provisions to secure information between sites, depending on the different customers you’re collaborating with. How you then configure each site may vary depending on the specific purpose.
For more finite customer relationships, extranets also provide a streamlined mechanism for customers to send you information and feedback and for your company to share updates and work products. When you need to share content with customers on a regular basis, as in a professional services business, you have the ability to customize your site template to reflect the nature of your business and interactions. For example, you might want to set up a timeline that measures budget, schedule and progress, or sections for deliverables, contracts and documents.
A good site design helps facilitate and organize an engagement with a customer. And with Office 365, it’s easy to provide site access to external users and share content. That ease of use is the key to getting the most from your SharePoint sites and Office 365. You no longer need to manage the complexities of authenticating those users into your network and sharing content across firewalls, because Office 365’s integrated environment eliminates many of those technical hurdles.
In the end, Office 365 makes creating extranet sites easier and more affordable than ever before, opening up new possibilities for collaboration and communication with your business partners and customers.
Learn more about using extranets as part of your collaboration strategy by contacting Portal Solutions.
