Solution for working with external collaborators in line with internal processes.
For one of our clients, we have developed a modern and easy-to-use extranet that allows the company to provide its employees with all the documentation and all the applications necessary for carrying out their activities.
The extranet solution that we have developed allows the company to provide its resellers and agents with a complete portal where you can find all the information, documents, and applications you need to be able to carry out your daily activities. For ease of use, the extranet is divided into two parts:
This section has been developed taking into account the diversity of documents that must be made available to collaborators. For this reason, we have created a solution that is as general as possible that allows responsible administrators to upload documents to the extranet pages and associate them with a series of metadata arbitrary and not defined at the outset. Then, using an administration interface, they can choose which metadata to show to users along with the document.
This allows the company to easily change page settings and to insert new areas dedicated to new documents. In fact, thanks to our solution, administrators only have to choose the metadata associated with the documents so that the search within the reference database returns the correct information.
It is also possible to create filters, also customizable by administrators, for find documents more easily necessary and Define which users are allowed to view documents uploaded to the portal.
Users can therefore access applications that allow them to carry out the most varied activities, from the simple visualization of data and statistics to the management of the store for which they are responsible.
These applications have been designed and developed as elements in their own right. They are therefore not automatically integrated with the extranet portal but have been developed separately and then installed inside it.
To simplify the future development of additional applications by the company, we have defined and made available a standard based on React.js that interfaces with the extranet architecture. Consequently, if the customer needs to develop additional applications and tools to be inserted in the extranet, he can do so without any problem.
The portal architecture consists of two main components that communicate with each other:
To meet the needs of the company, at Dev4Side we have created a web app and two databases (SQL Database and Cosmos Database) that separately manage the information of users authorized to access the extranet portal and the documents that the company makes available to its collaborators.
In the case of this project, it was decided to exploit two separate databases for data management in order to fully exploit the peculiarities and strengths of both types of databases and solve the problem in the best way.
The customer also asked us to communicate the extranet portal with the SharePoint intranet and the company's internal database so that we could access the data in their business ecosystem within the new extranet.
To allow this communication, APIs have been exposed that allow the intranet to interface with the outside world. In this way, the extranet portal can make calls to the APIs that will then obtain the necessary information from the SharePoint intranet and the company database and will communicate it in output to the extranet so that it can be viewed within the portal.
The Modern Apps team specializes in development and integration across the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem. We design native applications for Microsoft and Azure platforms, and implement business processes that integrate with and maximize the investment in Microsoft 365.
