extranet advice for ad agency?

subgenius

I work for an ad agency that wants to have an extranet on their website that would allow clients to check work-in-progress among other things. I've seen the "Client Login" feature on several sites, and was wondering:

Has anyone here either developed or had someone develop an extranet for their clients and/or vendors?

1b. What features have you found to be the most useful and least useful?

What advice do you have regarding planning/development/maintenence?

Thanks in advance.

AstroTeg

1b. This is like purchasing a car and wondering what features you'd prefer to see with the car. Depends on the person and the needs. Evaluate who will be using the extranet, why they will be using it, and then you can determine the features you would need.

Who's planning on doing the development? You can never have enough planning (but see 1b because 1b is part of the planning). As for maintenance this is pretty open - do you mean who will maintain putting content up? Or do you mean who will be maintaining the code?

subgenius

To get more specific about what the current plan is, I'm going to be coding the whole thing as of right now. My boss hasn't given me a deadline yet, but I'm anticipating somewhere between Feb. and March.

Right now, I'm trying to figure out what features we need, and more importantly, what features we don't need because they're already offered in applications, ie Outlook, Entourage (we're on Mac OS 9 here), etc.

So far, the most useful extranet features I can think of as it pertains to an ad agency would be:

View works in progress
Post comments
FTP Files
Post meeting notes/project requirements
View Production Schedule/List of Projects

I might need a calendar feature that would plot all the current projects on a calendar, but there's already a calendar in Entourage. I don't need ToDos for the same reason.

If there are any features that others have used that aren't listed above, I'd be curious as to what they are and why they were helpful. Thanks.