What new applications are being created for intranets?

Being built on the same technology, intranets can offer similar services within an organisation to those provided by the Internet outside it but: (1) they are not necessarily connected to the Internet and (2) their services can tap into internal organisation resources. With the advent of mobile computing, the notion of internal versus external network is no longer physical; intranets and extranets often make use of Virtual private networks (VPN). The main reason for the separation between intranets and the Internet is to preserve the confidentiality and security of the corporate information system. These mini-Internets are owned and managed by companies and enable these corporations to share their resources with their employees without confidential information being made available on the public Internet. Web sites running on an intranet look and act just like any other Web sites, but the firewall surrounding the intranet prevents any unauthorized access thus creating a private web. In a B2B context a company might grant limited access to its intranet to other companies; this is known as an "extranet". Intranets, extranets and Internet are realms of security created for dedicated cooperation and ordered by openness. More generally, access restrictions are of three kinds: from the outside to the inside (through firewalls and VPN), from the inside to the inside (user profiles and access levels), from the inside to the outside (e.g. web filtering).