Intranet Resources

What is an intranet?

An intranet is a privately shared network that uses all of the internet technologies that securely shares an organisations private applications or information for its employees. Intranet within an organisation connects an affiliated group of clients using the standard internet protocols, especially HTTP, TCP and IP. The IP based network nodes that are behind a firewall or several firewalls are connected by virtual and secure networks. It is not only an internal website belonging to an organisation, but also an important group of the computer infra and the private websites which form the internal communication entities of all organisations.

How is an intranet different from the internet?

Internets are world wide networks whereas an intranet is a network that is contained within an organisation. Intranets can also gain access to the internet but internets cannot gain access to an intranet. They are both based on very similar concepts, such as internet protocol suites and client- server computing and each of the well known internet protocols are found in an intranet, such as FTP, SMTP and HTTP.

How can an organisation’s employee’s access information on intranet from internet?

Extranet can be accessed by the following parties: suppliers, approved parties or customers, but intranets are limited only to its organisation’s employees. An organisation’s intranet does not need the access of the internet, but using the network gateways, together with a firewall, the intranet can then be shielded from unauthorised external access. Message encryptions and user authentication takes place at the gateway. Usually the VPN or virtual private network connectivity is given to those employees who are located on-site, who need to gain access to the information that is local to the organisation, together with communications and resources that are meant for internal usage.

How can an organisation leverage the intranet to increase its productivity?

To increase the productivity of an organisation, the intranet can provide various tools such as project management tools, transport management, corporate directory and sales deal tools etc.
If management have a new idea on corporate issues, quality or productivity, then a discussion forum can then be launched on the intranet. This can link each employee to the same page and increase its leadership decisions. To find out the popularity of a web page, user surveys can also be completed. The usage of the website can also be tracked using varied metrics software that can gauge the activities. The various teams within an organisation, such as the editorial, technology and creative teams then work together to produce the sites internally. The communications and HR teams collectively manage the intranet. At times, the complexity of the organisation’s website can make the intranet more complex than their public websites.

How do intranets relate to groupware?

Groupware is a term that means software that is used to facilitate group work. The groupware term is used a lot less and can be identified with these three products: Novell GroupWise, Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

The functionality of groupware is synonymous to collaborative computing and can embrace the following:

Versioning
Secure access
Database integration
Document sharing
Search and retrieval
Messaging
Collaborative authoring
Discussion forums

The technology of intranets is very well suited to each of these tasks, mainly because intranets have matured in certain areas that were weak, such as integrated search and security. The early roots of groupware products have shifted to architectures that are internet based, i.e. Microsoft Exchange 5.5 now supports LDAP directory services, NNTP based newsgroups, POP3 and IMAP4 internet mail.

What is the relationship between intranets, extranets and e-commerce?

Each of them uses internet protocols that connect their business users. Intranets are much more localised, so therefore can move the data faster than a distributed extranet. E-commerce also has similar limitations such as bandwidth. The control that network managers exert over their users can be different for each of the three technologies.

Administrators can prescribe policies and access to a fixed group of users on an intranet. For example Netscape Communicator 5 could also be used as a mail client and standard browser and Red Hat Linux could be the operating system for the standard desktop. An intranet work flow application could then be written that leverages the computing environment, which exercises the strong control.

On an extranet, the system architects from each participating company must be collaborated so as to ensure consistent semantics and a common interface. Extranet developers need to take a wide range of technologies into account than intranets, mainly because a company cannot enforce standards on their trading partners. For example, a company who use an extranet may use Internet Explorer, Navigator Gold 3.x and Netscape Navigator 4.5. To ensure that the collaborations work via the extranet, the applications have to perform well on all of the represented platforms.

E-commerce is very similar to the latter, mainly because the partners can be unknown toward one another. E-commerce applications support levels of transactional integrity and security that are not present in extranet or intranet applications.

What is needed to ensure that the intranet works effectively?

The maintenance of the intranet requires a well dedicated team who know their tasks. They should be aware which level of interactivity is desired and the purpose for which the intranet has been created. The levels of each webpage should be designed and drawn up, and the decision needs to be made whether the additions, deletions and the page updates should be centrally owned or not. The intranet persons should ensure that the information that is fed into the intranet is relevant and accurate. On the technical side, the intranet users need to bear in mind the information needs of the user, the network configuration, web server setup, testing and build setup, installation of client applications, creating the document frameworks and the software on which the intranet should be built on. A dedicated IT support team should be available 24/7 should any issues arise, especially for those employees who are situated around the globe.