Content Management for Extranets

One reason companies don't use web based extranets is the difficulty of maintaining web content. Most companies find it hard enough maintaining the content of their public website. The idea of using the web for day-to-day business communication seems unrealistic. Maintaining information that changes on a daily basis would require complete control over the site's content. The technical experience necessary to achieve this is usually outside of the skill set of a typical small to medium sized company. Automating the process of maintaining site content usually means spending huge amounts of money. It can be difficult to argue that a company should spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make maintaining a resource book easier. An effective extranet requires a content management system. Unfortunately most CMS systems are out of reach both financially and technically for many small and medium sized businesses.

Newfangled's policy of including free and unlimited user licenses to our CMS overcomes this barrier so any company can experience the benefits of a company extranet.

Helping clients recognize the value of extranets raises their understanding of the overall value of the web as a strategic tool. Companies who maintain static websites usually fail to experience the real benefits that the web has to offer. Therefore, the web does not get high priority in comparison to other marketing and communications mediums. But when the web solves problems and provides cost-effective, powerful solutions, its strategic importance to a company grows. Extranets are one of the ways the web demonstrates its real value.

Our own Client Manager extranet has helped us capture this true value of the web. We believe so strongly in the value of extranets that we provide our agency partners our extranet system. To this end we have used the NewfangledCMS to create a client page extranet system that can be used by any agency or design firm. We make this system available to all of our agency partners free of charge (although a monthly hosting fee is required). Clients, jobs, documents, schedules, layouts, and other information can be added to the client extranet using the simple NewfangledCMS interface. Clients access these pages with assigned user names and passwords.

The client page extranet system is a valuable and useful tool. It provides our agency partners a hands-on experience of how the web can be utilized in ways many companies have not recognized.