Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Unleashed

Understanding Extranets for Collaborating with Partners, Vendors, and Clients

An extranet is a private network securely extended to share part of an organization’s information, resources, or processes with partners, vendors, and clients. In SharePoint specifically, an extranet is a web application that is shared with external users. Extranets are used to collaborate with external users where they have to authenticate to gain access to list and libraries. Extranets are used to solve various challenges, such as sharing medical information with patients and abiding health-care privacy regulations such as HIPAA, which dictates that sensitive documents be uploaded to a secure site instead of emailing the large documents or using an FTP client for ...