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A Fine and Private Page
By Jim Sterne
You don't need to book an expensive extranet
to give site visitors rooms of their own
For many, the
words extranet and E-commerce conjure visions
of highly paid Java programmers melding complex enterprisewide
systems with state-of-the-art, gazillion-page Web sites. That's
the sort of project you try to avoid if you don't have an
IT department the size of a small country.
Does that mean
small companies should steer clear of anything that smacks
of back-office integration? Absolutely not. Web technology
is ideal for any organization that wants to improve communications
with business partners but lacks the resources for a full-blown
marriage between its network and customer-relationship-management
systems. Those with shallowish pockets can take this as consolation:
sometimes technological sophistication has more to do with
appearance than with application.
Consider extranets,
a relatively straightforward customer-management concept that
has become freighted with the jargon of intranets and virtual
private networks. If building an extranet sounds too involved,
think instead of creating Web pages that only specified parties
can see. Such pages may not even require password protection.
I am the head of a very small company (consisting of me, myself,
and the recently hired I) with a Web site that acts as a marketing
vehicle for my consulting services. My site also contains
a discrete page with photos of my dog Puck, a schipperke,
that my wife and I wanted to share with members of a discussion
list for dog lovers. Is it password protected? No. Private?
Sure.
The Puck page
is private in the same sense that an unlisted telephone number
is private. It is known to, and therefore used by, only a
designated few. Puck's photos are not linked to any other
page anywhere. Family, friends, and the dog fanciers on my
discussion list know how to find it because we've E-mailed
them the specific address. That level of security suffices
to protect Puck's privacy, and it's enough for many of my
clients as well.
I also use private
pages for business-related purposes. I use them, for example,
as a means of making my PowerPoint presentations available
to conference hosts who wish to hand out the material to attendees.
Printing and shipping the presentations is a pain, and I've
had consistently bad luck sending 2MB or 3MB files as E-mail
attachments. So I create private pages on my site that people
can download instead. I send the conference producers the
URLs of the pages; they can then click and capture the files
without worrying about viruses, gateways, or E-mail in-box
limitations. Again, the information on those pages isn't something
that everyone who visits my site needs to see, but if it gets
out, it's not going to do any damage.
Of course, much
information needs ironclad security. I discuss Internet strategies,
potential markets, products, services, and business models
with my clients. For that kind of information, an unpublished
address isn't good enough. It calls for both private pages
and passwords. Creating a password-protected page isn't
done at a trivial cost, but it's not a budget buster either.
Password-protection routines are described in most on-line
HTML tutorials. (The company hosting your site will have to
handle the server-side software. If it doesn't know how to
do that, then stop reading this article and start looking
for another provider.)
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