Designing for extranet from the beginning?

Question

I've been tasked to develop a web application to cover one of our business functions. It needs to have external access from outside our network. At the same time, it needs to be done fairly quickly. I don't have any experience in extranet applications so I'm not exactly sure what all is involved. Learning about it is taking time. I'd like to get the app working first.

What kind of things should I be considering if I decide to not incorporate external access from the beginning and tack it on later? Is that just doomed from the get go?

Thanks, Keith

Answer 1

to consider:
How are you going to authenticate?
How important is it to not be broken into?

Answer 2

You can take many things for granted when you are developing for local network:

1. Highspeed network

2. Trusted user base

3. Same timezone for all users (this makes maintenance jobs easier to schedule among other things)

4. Control over which browsers and versions users should use

5. Authentication against LAN authentication system or no authentication at all due to trusted nature of user base

6. Custom port number on web-server as there is no firewall between users and web-server (though this more of deployment issue)

You will need to challenge all these assumptions when designing for extra net. For example you should estimate the slowest client connection you need to support. Oddest or most restricted browsers your users might use.

If you decide to use SSL, do check the performance of your website on the slowest connection from the beginning. I have seen many SSL sites perform terribly on slow connections.

Answer 3

Some points I would consider.

1. Authentication. Who will use it externally and who will use it internally? Which parts of the site should they be able to access? So design in an authentication mechanism early to allow access based on user id and groups.

2. Load. Internal users may be few, but how many users will there be externally? The solution should be scalable to the number of expected users.

3. Will external users be guest users or must they be registered? Build a user registration component.

Whether intranet or extranet you should take sensible precautions about validating user input data before using it in your back-end SQL etc.