Is an Intranet in Your Future?

Private Internets Improve Communications to Boost Productivity

Information -- and quick, easy access to it -- can be one of an organization's greatest assets in an environment where the only constant is change. More than ever before, organizations are being challenged to be more productive, more responsive and more informed. The common link running through these challenges is the need to enable and expand communications within an organization, with its partners and its customers.

While the public Internet, especially the Worldwide Web, is receiving most of the attention in the media, more and more IS professionals are discovering the advantages of using these same Internet technologies over their organizations' private networks to serve the information needs within an enterprise. These "intranets" are being called the most important new computing platform since the personal computer by many in the industry because they offer a quick, inexpensive, standardized way to achieve immediate gains in helping people find information, work together and distribute their results effectively. The result is higher productivity, lower costs and greater competitiveness in the global marketplace.

Most private intranets rely primarily on the same technologies used to create the public Worldwide Web -- web servers for providing vital organizational information and web browsers for accessing these servers. Web servers can be located anywhere on the network, allowing those closest to the source of the information to be responsible for its timeliness, accuracy and distribution. As things change, information can be updated on the server quickly and easily and made available to the rest of the enterprise without expensive and time consuming typesetting, printing, distribution and mailing.

At its most basic level, employees can use the intranet to easily find and read online a variety of internal documents such as training manuals, marketing materials, and telephone directories, including graphics, images, audio and video information. When the web server is linked to a database, "live" data -- inventories, price lists, sales figures, product specifications, schedules, etc. -- can be made available in real time without the need for customized data access applications. Cutting edge intranet applications go so far as to enable users to interact with proprietary systems that govern business operations.

The inherent "connectedness" of web technology enables information of all types -- text, graphics, images, audio and video -- located on disparate servers anywhere on the network to appear to the user to come from a single source, and are accessible simply by clicking on a highlighted area appearing on their web browser window. The tremendous power of the web is derived primarily from this simplicity.

The growth of intranets, while relatively recent, especially in the corporate world, is nonetheless enormous. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal (Nov. 7, 1995), the market for intranets is expected to quadruple this year and almost triple the year after that. Industry analysts at The Gartner Group expect more than 50 percent of large enterprises to have not just intranets in place, but business-critical "enterprise-wide webs" by 1998. And industry leader Netscape Corporation reports that more than half its web server sales are to corporations for private-network use.

Intranets offer organizations an attractive solution to many internal communications problems, but perhaps most importantly, intranets can simplify and standardize access to an organization's diverse data sources, addressing one of the biggest headaches organizations face today. The Internet technologies used by intranets make it easy for computers of virtually any type -- PCs, Macintosh computer and workstations -- to access information stored on any computer and interact with applications running on any computer, including mainframes.

At the same time, intranets allow organizations to quickly and easily develop and deploy cross-platform applications at low cost because there is no need to port a user interface to each client platform. Instead, low-cost, widely available web browsers such as Netscape provide a "universal user interface" to accomplish cross-platform interaction.

The Internet technologies used to build intranets are readily available, proven, highly robust and reliable, and they are available for all major platforms at surprisingly low costs (sometimes free), especially compared to proprietary networking environments. Internet technologies are based on widely accepted standard protocols and application programming interfaces (APIs) such as TCP/IP, Windows sockets and HTML, virtually guaranteeing the wide availability of sophisticated tools to build, maintain, manage and expand the infrastructure to meet changing needs, as well as allowing standards-based communications between external partners and customers.

Intranets are appropriate for any organization needing to cost-effectively distribute constantly changing information on demand to its employees, partners and customers. Many groups within an organization can benefit from intranets, including human resources, marketing and sales, training, corporate communications, MIS, research and development, finance and many others.

Corporations are using intranets to post company news, corporate policy changes, training manuals, telephone directories, job postings and other general information for all employees. Intranets can also be used to distribute software and other materials throughout the organization. Through the use of firewalls, secure servers and other security measures, restricted information, such as personnel records, financial data or R&D documents, can be managed to ensure that only those people with the proper authorization have access. In addition, firewalls and other devices can be used to provide a secure connection to the public Internet, enabling employees to access the vast amounts of information available there while limiting access to the enterprise intranet from the outside.

Today, many organizations have offices in geographically dispersed locations, with sales and marketing in one office, for example, engineering in another, industrial design in another and accounting and corporate management at the headquarters. Dedicated, high-speed communications networks like Sprint Frame Relay, Sprint ATM or other private networks become important links that can greatly enhance communications among these groups by making it easier and cheaper to share information across a wide-area intranet. The model can even be extended to include important vendors and customers, too. Salespeople on the road can use a remote dial-up service like Sprint's Intranet Dial Service to access the enterprise intranet for everything from price lists, inventory levels, marketing collateral materials and sales guides to entering orders, filing expense reports and exchanging electronic mail.

The intranet offers a cost-effective, highly efficient way for organizations to enhance their internal communications, enabling them to be more productive, more responsive and more informed. Using the proven, standardized, low-cost component technology of the Internet, many organizations can develop and deploy cross-platform intranet applications quickly and easily.

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