The road to an extranet
It seems that the concept of an extranet has been something I’ve had to tackle at almost every enterprise company I’ve worked at. Each company had a few different requirements to include sharing of sensitive corporate documents with remote employees. But in general, the common task was a solution to share documents with customers, vendors and resellers. Lately I’ve been thinking about this problem again. I’ve toyed with the idea of using Sharepoint to do this but Sharepoint can be incredibly complex if your needs are rather basic. At a previous company, I wrote a basic document management system in (bad) PHP that had some very basic rules: who can view your files, who has permission to edit your files and who else can share them. The problem is that once you attain your initial needs you realize that you need more. For example, once you’ve created your contacts and groups, you can apply access rights to folders and files but unless you’ve developed some kind of admin interface its not that easy for others to make changes. It all seems like such a simple thing but it always ends up being a pain in the butt. For this reason I’ve been pretty interested in some new start-ups who are working to develop easy solutions for the small - medium business market. Xythos in San Francisco took time to post a little video on Vimeo which was nice.
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