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>Excuse me for asking a dumb question here, but what is an "extranet"?
>I know an intranet is an internal net within an organization, but what is
>an extranet supposed to do? Or is an extranet just a fancy jargon word for
>a web site?
>
>Paula
Not a dumb question at all, just a matter of Jargon-Creep(tm) running
head-on into MarketingSpeak(R).
An "Intranet" is what used to be called an "internetworked communications
system" before the Buzzword Control Officer was assigned to a new position
within the Legacy Document Migration Taskforce. Machines on such a network
used the internet protocol (TCP/IP) to talk to each other and were
protected from outside access (the "Big I" Internet), by a specially
configured server called a "Firewall."
When the Legacy Document Migration project tanked, and everyone went
looking for a new job, the former Buzzword Control Officer discovered that
"worldwide secured internetworked communications system" wouldn't fit
gracefully on a resume, so it got buzzworded to "Extranet" to show the kids
in Marketing that it was a bigger, better, more-important thing than an
Intranet.
A LAN was once two or three machines talking to each other in the same
office... and a WAN was alll the machines in two or more buildings talking
to each other.... About the time that the WAN engineers became
responsible for all 3000 machines at every plant within the Gotham Metro
Area talking to each other over leased lines and started reporting to
SuperEngineers controlling all the WANs in whole geopolitical regions, the
WAN engineers started thinking about it as the LAN.... the Extranet became
a cool way of thinking about the worldwide secured internetworked
communications system.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Dan BRINEGAR Information Developer/Research Droid/Mac Guy
I'm *not* a nerd: there were no pocket calculators when I was in
Junior High...What few people I've met that could have
possibly been nerds at one time are now old enough to have attained
guru status and don't really count..
vr2link -at- vr2link -dot- com
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