By Drew Rob
April 16, 2004

It looks like a great idea -- using extranets, or collaboration portals, to dissolve the boundaries between businesses or organizations, enabling greater knowledge sharing and collaboration. But the concept hasn't completely fulfilled all those expectations.

Andreas Antonopoulos, a principal analyst for Nemertes Research LLC in New York City, is in the midst of a survey (due out later this spring) of how firms are using their extranets. Early findings indicated that most companies had deployed at least one extranet, but they were still in a fairly rudimentary form.

"Most of the extranets we see are 'shallow' involving external users accessing internal systems," he explains. "We see few system-to-system extranets."

To read the full article visit:http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/netsys/article.php/3341531