By Peggy Watt
Network World, 7/27/98

Faster than a speeding ping. More powerful than an Alpha processor. Look, out on the network, on the Web server - it's a supersite!

The term "supersite" refers less to size or strength than to a new architecture that blurs the lines between an intranet, extranet and an Internet site. Supersites are rescuing companies entangled in disparate Web projects because they provide a model for housing several component layers on one or more linked servers and sharing a code base and content. Tight security measures differentiate the users who view only the Web site, the business partners who access extranet data and the employees who delve into the core intranet.

USWeb Corp., a Web consulting firm in Santa Clara, Calif., coined the term and built some of the first supersites. One of its first supersite developments was for Warner-Chappell Music, Inc., a huge music publishing company in Burbank, Calif.

From www.warnerchappell.com, Web-surfing music lovers can mine Warner-Chappell resources by entering key words to find a particular song. The Web server sends the query to an Oracle Corp. database running on an IBM AS/400. Security is implemented down to the database field, so the user sees only public information. A fan can retrieve interviews with the artist, albums containing the song, snippets of lyrics and an audio clip, for example.

A Warner-Chappell business partner can dig a little deeper from the same query interface, gleaning fees and licensing information. For example, an agent choosing a movie soundtrack may check the licensing fees for artists who have recorded a particular song.

Inside Warner-Chappell, an employee uses the same interface to search records in the legacy database, update license information or verify fees.

It sure beats the notoriously out-of-date, voluminous paper catalog that Warner-Chappell's staff previously used to research such information for agents and other clients, says Steve Scott, director of new media for Warner-Chappell. Fans were on their own.

"We decided we would get more bang for our buck if we developed some tools that could satisfy all those needs," Scott says.

The Web site, which went online only this month, took more than a year to develop, mostly so the company could fill the massive database with such multimedia data as sound and video clips and the basic records that used to be printed in a catalog. The database also contains promotional materials and press clippings and soon will integrate with the database Warner-Chappell keeps of license contracts.

The Warner-Chappell supersite is typical of early implementations by being application-specific. The same music database is available to several audiences in different degrees. But the company also maintains a Lotus Development Corp. Notes intranet that contains strictly internal information, such as human resources records. Scott says the IT staff is too wary of the security risk to hook up everything to the system that is accessed by anyone with a browser.

Even USWeb's own Internet, extranet and intranet sites are not fully integrated, although they soon will be, says Toby Corey, president and chief operating officer of the firm.

USWeb uses the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol to manage the entire user list and has implemented a common data model for all tables and other information presented on Web pages.

"Although security is an issue and will always be an issue, it's not a barrier to adoption," Corey says.

DON'T REINVENT THE DATABASE
USWeb came up with the word "supersite," but others are onto the idea, too.

Federal Express Corp. has embraced the concept for its interactive Web package-tracking application. For the site, FedEx set up strict authentication procedures so different levels of users could access the same internal data. "From the very beginning, that was our approach. We didn't want to duplicate data," says Tom Buss, senior manager of enterprise data protection at the Memphis, Tenn., company.

Tracking data is available at www.fedex.com to anyone interested. Certain trading partners can access the extranet component for more detailed records. And employees, even though they use the online applications from behind a firewall, are querying the same database as the external users, Buss says.

The description fits for Autoweb.com, Inc., a three-year-old Web marketing company, too. Autoweb. com's core application - matching car-buying customers and dealers - runs on a supersite.

That site, www.autoweb.com, invites car shoppers to enter their preferences, from model, year and options to trade-in information. The browser queries generate HTML pages that display information drawn from a Microsoft Corp. SQL Server database. Users can get referrals to a pool of some 3,000 dealers, which can in turn retrieve the potential buyer's input specs, says Robert Vermeulen, vice president of information technology at the Santa Clara company.

Dealers can see purchase requests, sales, inquiry reports and other password-protected information. Behind the firewall on the company intranet, Autoweb.com executives analyze the same data to identify trends and needs.

A TREND BY ANY NAME
J.P. Morgan & Company, Inc. calls the convergence of its Internet, extranet and intranet under a public-key infrastructure (PKI) an "ultranet," but the concept is the same as a supersite. "An ultranet simply means an enterprise Web environment managed under a single security domain," says Ainsley Rattray, a vice president with the New York financial firm.

The supersite is another name for the extended enterprise that is crucial to global companies, says Allan Frank, chief technology officer of AnswerThink Consulting Group in Philadelphia. The firm guides its clients in designing and building an extended enterprise or "interprise" model, he says.

"In effect, [an interprise] is the interconnection of trading partners via the Internet, extranets and intranets," says Frank, estimating that three-quarters of AnswerThink clients operate in the extended enterprise. They link to manufacturing partners' databases to track orders, give clients access to purchasing records or conduct other business operations. The result is blurring boundaries that are characteristic of both a supersite and virtual partnerships.

"How much of a supersite a company will implement often depends on its confidence level," Corey says. Governmental organizations, especially the Department of Defense, won't consider the supersite approach for quite some time. "Maybe some organizations, like those, will always stay behind a glass door," he says.

But, he and Frank point out, security capabilities are improving rapidly and enhanced encryption will reassure nervous companies. USWeb encourages companies to implement PKIs; AnswerThink recommends virtual private networks.

FedEx's Buss says he is constantly evaluating new security procedures and expects that as security technology improves, the company will make more resources available on such multilevel Web sites.

ALMOST ANYONE CAN BE SUPER
Even companies that already have separate intranets and extranets and an Internet presence can knit together components and take advantage of a supersite architecture without rebuilding.

Polk Audio, Inc. in Baltimore, for example, revamped its Web site to give consumers access - and even input - to some corporate databases. The site initially offered merely "electronic literature," says Al Ballard, Polk Audio's vice president of marketing. But the new USWeb-developed supersite gives the various visitors different degrees of entry into the Polk Audio clubhouse.

Polk Audio customers can join Club Polk online. They submit forms to obtain warranties and to qualify for discounts on parts and services. Club members also get bulletins about limited products or accessories available only through the Web site. Most purchase requests are referred to appropriate dealers. Also online, Polk Audio's more than 700 retailers get customer leads and use Web tools to track orders, download marketing materials and find information they used to get by telephone. These folks enter DealerNet, the supersite's password-protected extranet.

Through the Polk Audio intranet, housed in Baltimore, employees can link to DealerNet and Club Polk, USWeb-hosted sites in Chicago.

"We rebuilt from the bottom up," Ballard says. "And we thought about how to serve our other customers, besides the consumers. There's the dealer, the sales rep on the floor, the press. We saw the possibility of delivering the same information at different levels of detail to different people."

USWeb started using the term "supersite" last fall. It intentionally did not trademark it, hoping the concept and terminology would catch on, Corey says.

Supersites can help bring standards and efficiency to disorderly Web sites and offer continuity to multifaceted intranet, extranet and Internet communications, Corey suggests. He has begun using those terms almost interchangeably, asserting that degrees of access are the only differentiation.

Whether supersites are heroes for the Webbed corporation is still up in the air. But USWeb and other supersite advocates are decidedly on a mission to save the wired world.