Intranet & Extranet Services Gautier MS

Steve Longley was having trouble with Colombia, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

Longley is CEO of Integra Relationship Marketing, a direct-mail business targeting Hispanic Americans, which communicates regularly with customers and collaborators in those countries. Soon after Integra was founded in 2003, Longley realized how laborious and complicated it was to get input on documents sent back and forth by fax or simple e-mail. He set out to find an easier way, and discovered “extranets.”

Now, any number of people can easily massage or comment on a project at any time of the day or night over the company’s extranet, a computerized information system that can be accessed only by approved users within or outside the company.

“Transfer time of large documents was much more efficient using the extranet,” Longley says. Now, information-heavy communications no longer clog up Integra’s computers or have to wait until business hours in Princeton, N.J., where the company is based.

To build the extranet, Integra hired WorkZone, a four-year-old Conshohocken, Pa., startup that provides complete, private systems for businesses and facilitates their use. WorkZone was started from scratch, with no customers, and now services more than 150 companies and 15,000 individuals.

“It allowed us to very simply organize our clients’ files and grow the number of contributors we had uploading and downloading files to and from our site,” Longley says.

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