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But agents soon will be able to get electronic forms and cut processing time down to five minutes or less: Farm Bureau Financial Services, an insurance and financial services company in West Des Moines, Iowa, is rolling out a new extranet for its growing number of agent offices and affiliates across the country.

The extranet environment replaces the "dumb" terminals that linked the company's 370 remote offices to headquarters with browser-based workstations or laptops. "In the past, we just threw a router out there with TN3270 and a green screen," says Duke Burrell, network architect for Farm Bureau Financial Services. "As our agent offices and business affiliates grow, so does our need to get information to them."

Farm Bureau now also provides Novell VPN (virtual private network) client access at the desktop for the Novell BorderManager-based VPN, and some of the company's larger offices will have their own servers equipped with VPN access to the hosts at headquarters. "That will be more of a site-to-site VPN," Burrell says.

The insurance and financial services company uses the IPsec (IP security) feature in the VPN software for encrypting the IP transmission and authenticating the devices. Burrell says a few Farm Bureau offices purchased their own Internet access, so filters and access controllers will also be used on their edge routers for security, but the bulk of the sites and users connecting to the extranet will do so with IPsec. Digital certificates also are on the horizon for authenticating agents when they log onto the extranet, as are digital signatures for agents to electronically sign forms.

Farm Bureau's server farm consists of clustered Novell NetWare 5.1 servers and Microsoft Windows 2000 servers connected to a Xiotech Corp. Magnitude SAN (storage area network) system. Among its applications are a massive Lotus Notes installation and some homegrown applications for policy-generation and other insurance-specific applications. For now, the extranet site contains mainly PDF files of policy forms for the agents, but Farm Bureau has begun recoding select legacy mainframe applications, including those for policy, agent membership and commission statement, with Allaire Corp.'s ColdFusion and Spectra tools to make them Web-based and accessible on the site, too.