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I defined an intranet as "An infrastructure based on Internet standards and technologies that supports sharing of content within a limited and well-defined group." The "infrastructure" referred to the organizational and management infrastructure that created, managed, and shared the content. The only technical constraint was that the physical network be based on the Internetworking Protocol (IP).
You might notice that this definition encompasses what we call extranets today, because the defining factor is a "limited and well-defined group," and does not specify any official organizational affiliation. The Web, in contrast, is an unlimited group.
Today I think of intranets, extranets, and the Web as collections of content. An intranet is a set of content shared by a well-defined group within a single organization. An extranet is a set of content shared by a well-defined group, but one that crosses enterprise boundaries.
These access distinctions are important, because Web-based content uses the same technical infrastructure regardless of access decisions. This means it is much easier to change access to specific content than it was in the old proprietary world,where making something more widely available often entailed a major conversion effort.
As technical infrastructure becomes less of a barrier to accessing specific content, it becomes important to pay attention to how, or if, we want to restrict access. The terms "intranet" and "extranet," as imperfect as they are, provide us with conceptual and pragmatic tools for discussing to whom we want to make specific content available.
These terms may continue to evolve in meaning. For now, a set of content accessed by members of a single organization is an intranet, even if the information travels across the public Internet infrastructure.
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Outsourcing
