The explosive growth of outsourcing and other collaborative business practices put more importance than ever on effective communications and planning with suppliers and customers.  Information must be available when needed on a 24x7 basis. Yet, public and private sector organizations must also protect sensitive information, such as design and forecast documents, from inappropriate disclosure. This problem is especially significant when sharing information with external users that change roles or even employers; resulting in an increased risk of unauthorized information access and disclosure.

Collaboration systems, such as Microsoft SharePoint, are ideal for disseminating sensitive documents, distributing product announcements, and providing discussion forums for clarifying and resolving issues. When combined with the Epok Edition for Microsoft SharePoint, a business provides suppliers and customers with access to an information rich, highly secure, document repository and collaboration environment that can be scaled to support a global supplier network.

With Epok software:

• Purchasing and manufacturing staff  take on responsibility for external user management, which improves IT efficiency by distributing the provisioning burden and allowing the flow of information to scale to very large numbers of suppliers’ and customers’ users.
• Users can instantly view a dynamic list of all supply chain sites for which he or she has access authorization. Proactive policy notification and acknowledgement ensures external users are aware of their obligations for information use when they access your company’s MOSS sites, libraries and documents.
• Personalized watermarking of sensitive documents with user name, organization and conditions for document use reduce inadvertent disclosure of sensitive information. 
• Access terms can be easily customized for individual suppliers, customers or groups of them.
• Access rights are based on the terms of supply agreements and customer contracts which allow site access to terminate automatically unless the agreements are extended.
• Confidentiality, can be enforced at the site, document library and document level.  This allows sales, purchasing and manufacturing managers to control the access to suppliers, customers, outsourcers and other third parties to only the information they need and that they are entitled to see.
• Audit controls including information-rich access logs and reports within the SharePoint environment dramatically limit opportunities for unauthorized disclosure and other malfeasance.
• Each supplier can manage and maintain their own list of authorized users and groups for their sites, libraries and documents, which relieves corporate IT departments from the cumbersome task of managing accounts for extranet users.
• Users from geographically dispersed offices, that may use different authentication systems, can single sign-on to SharePoint sites hosted in any office.