Intranets & Extranets
Often, an organization’s most important presence isn’t its public web site, but the secure, internal interfaces reserved for employees and business partners. We excel at building web-based tools and applications for secure interaction with employees, distributors, sales agents, customers or group that can benefit from a dedicated, personalized site. A key requirement in today's business environment is the ability to communicate more effectively, both internally with your employees and externally with your trading partners and customers.
An intranet is a private - internal - business network that enables your employees to share information, collaborate, and improve communications.
An extranet 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.
Maintaining intranets and extranets using Content management systems
Any information on an intranet or extranet must be up-to-date and accurate. This has meant a growth in the use of content management systems (CMS) for managing and updating information.
A CMS is a set of procedures for adding, managing and publishing content to an intranet, extranet or a website. Any non-technical user can edit and publish content using templates and a simple web-browser interface. This is much more efficient than sending web content to a webmaster to be published.
The key elements of a CMS application are that you can have:
- Unlimited flexibility with branding and user experience
- Unified branding and user experience across multiple public sites and private portals
- Enterprise-class content management capabilities, including multi-level approval, publishing workflow, and content scheduling
- Content targeting capabilities based on customer information
- The ability to develop custom functionality or entire applications within the website platform
- Built-in blogging functionality and the ability to facilitate communication with the customer
- The ability to embed Flash and Silverlight rich media applications
- The ability to incorporate and present information from other line of business applications
- A robust built-in website and enterprise search capability Reporting and website analytics that enable site owners to gauge the effectiveness of online strategies
- The ability to optimize for organic search ranking within leading search engines such as Microsoft Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and Ask
- A comprehensive security model to control access to content as well as publishing rights
- A high availability solution with robust performance and scalability
Whatever the sophistication of the CMS technology, it is important that you have someone in charge of managing the content and adequate maintenance procedures.
Templates and metadata
Templates are documents that display information in a set way and allow you to:
- Input data easily
- Produce content that is displayed consistently
- Maintain existing content more effectively
Templates also ensure that metadata is added correctly. Metadata is simply data about data, e.g. the metadata of a book includes its title, author, ISBN number and year of publication.
For an electronic document, metadata often consists of - among other things - keywords that describe its content. Adding the 'right' keywords helps users to achieve more accurate search results. For example, if you add keywords such as 'email', 'mobile phone' and 'internet' to a webpage entitled 'Policy on electronic communications at work', this would help a user searching for your organization’s policy on using the internet at work. /p>
T/DG’s Expertise
We have expert professionals around web-design, RIA, usability Engineering, Adobe Product Suite and various content management systems e.g MS-Sharepoint, SiteFinity, DotNetNuke, Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress etc and can help you to leverage the potential of various CMS systems for your inhouse as well as online web presence needs.