Notes on "Shifting from an Intranet to a Client-Accessible Extranet" (Jaco Swart, Tait Electronics)

Jaco from Tait Electronics is talking about client extranets.

To start, he showed this movie:

Jaco's punch line: it's great when you find what you've been looking for.

Back in 2005, reviewed what Tait was doing and decided that they needed to do things better. Saw an opportunity to make it easier for customers to do business with Tait. Have to compete with some very large organizations ... so need to create a great customer experience at Tait to win the customer.

Some of the technical and human issues:
- Creating an authentication system
- Working with proprietary applications ... that are designed in a different way to other systems
- IT projects are hard to estimate. Good to have "Phase 1" and "Phase 2"
- On an extranet, you need to increase the context around information.

Jaco VPN'd into his Intranet, as per a remote salesperson would have to do. He showed us around a few things.

Future work:
- centralized data
- improved website platform
- rich extranet

Jaco blogs at Rainbow Layers.