The new America Online Enterprise division formed by America Online Inc is offering businesses private online areas. Private online areas extend consumer-based services to enable authorized individuals inside and outside of companies to send electronic mail, hold conferences with each other in real-time and in private, consult proprietary and internal databases, check current business news and reference databases, and navigate pertinent Internet pages. With America Online Enterprise, businesses and organizations can build private networks for employees, customers or suppliers to enable quick delivery and receipt of critical information, the company told the Reuters news wire. America Online, based in Vienna, Virginia, has become the world’s largest consumer online service in the past year, and now claims more than 5m subscribers. It said a survey of its users discovered that 30%, or about 1.7m of its members, used America Online for business purposes. We think we can blur those lines and hopefully bring the two together, chief executive Steve Case said, referring to the divide that has traditionally existed between consumer online services and business-to-business services. Until now, there has been no mechanism to make it easy for corporations to plug into AOL, he added. Each area is customized with features or applications chosen by the sponsor. Private online areas can integrate America Online’s business offerings, including current news and company research from providers such as The New York Times, BusinessWeek and Investor’s Business Daily. Private online areas can also selectively present relevant Internet sites or full Internet access with File Transfer Protocol, Newsgroups, Gopher and Web access built in. The service includes customized applications for registration, connection to the network, security features, billing and reporting services, as well as customer and technical support. To date, the new America Online division has undertaken a pilot project to link 100,000 franchised brokers in the Century 21 Corp property network. The brokers use the private network to distribute potential customer contacts to agents located in areas where their clients plan to relocate. America Online has also begun operating pilot projects with MixStar Inc, a Laguna Beach, California based mortgage lending group; Turner Broadcasting System Inc’s Cable News Network and Harvard Business School. In addition, the company is in talks with a major US car-maker to set up a private network to communicate with local car dealers.
