What is an Intranet?

Perhaps you would find it surprising to know that there are a high number of organisations (in particular the corporates) that would invest in technology simply for the sake of investment and with no clear indication of business goals. Why an organisation invests in deployment of an Intranet and what the business goals are for the strategy would depend very much on who you talk to and at what level of the organisational hierarchy they are. For example if the question is put to people at operational level possible answers would be

• more efficient provision of information
• higher quality or abundance of information
• better connectivity among the workers through say email and collaboration forums
• Lowering cost of transactions.

At the strategic level, executive managers may state the reasons for the deployment of an Intranet as

• better organisational productivity
• better connectivity and support of sales and maintenance personnel away from the office through provision of appropriate information
• better personal productivity through efficient connectivity
• better management and use of resources through centralising and sharing
• enabling working from home

For those goals stated at the operational level, task is predominantly of technical nature. However Intranet deployment for the type of goals that we have stated at the strategic level requires rethinking of the fundamental organisational structure and its building blocks. It requires an alternative working culture where individuals are much more enabled and consequently responsible. This responsibility would be in the form of managing their time, their resources, and their choices. Task is no longer one of technical implementation. Implementation of Intranet without a clear understanding of its potential benefits and much more to the point without a clear understanding of organisational goals therefore would not result in gaining full potentials of the investment.

Intranet or Internal Web (or sometimes even Internal Internet) is an internal network that is private to the organisation and only visible to the employees. Note that Intranets do not necessarily have to be geographically limited and that they can span the globe provided that access is limited to the employees. Basically a Web server is employed for internal information needs of the clients (the employees). Drivers for the Internet/Web platform are;

• It has become very common to disseminate information using Web servers.
• Web servers are relatively easy to set up.
• There is compatibility at the front end when a browser is used as the client. Developer does not need to worry about client compatibility.
• The whole idea of hypertext is that information can be of many formats and many types, including text, image, and multi-media.
• Adherence to Internet standards and protocols mean ease of connectivity to the Internet and consequently;
• Remote logging in capabilities.
• Possibility of extending to business partners over the Internet.
• Better support of employee away from head quarters.
• Employee empowerment.

Essentially it is an internal network that uses Internet communication standards. TCP/IP has to come into the equation because HTTP that Web server uses is actually a TCP/IP service. In other words HTTP uses TCP/IP for communication on the Internet. This in essence makes the Intranet a multi-tier client-server architecture with browser used as the client, business logic tier is at the Web server and if applicable the application servers, and a database or a number of database servers used for back-end storage of data. Other elements of the architecture that could be mentioned are the middleware components such as the CGI, ASP, JSP scripts. Also worth mentioning as middleware are the proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs).

How does the Intranet compare and contrast with Local Area Network? You could be looking at a number of criteria such as security, bandwidth, geographical scope, platform, communication protocols, connectivity, etc.

As Intranet is likely to play a very important part as the information infrastructure of the organisation, availability becomes an important factor.

Intranets quite readily relate to email and they become the email platform for the enterprise. Simple Message transport Protocol or SMTP enables simple text messaging and it is one of the protocols within the TCP/IP suit that Intranets inherit. In addition there is Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions or MIME that allows different content type including multi-media content and streaming audio as part of the message. Intranets are internal networks that are adhering to TCP/IP, replacing the propriety network protocols such as Novell network. It becomes inevitable therefore that they would also replace the proprietary mail systems such as Microsoft MAPI in the same fashion.

Intranet technology also enables collaborative computing within the organisation. The potential fruits of collaboration could be;

• Sharing of resources such as supporting knowledge material.
• Web-based sharing of routine business documents and consequently improving work flow efficiency.
• Online messaging and use of email, interactive chat, video conferencing, Bulletin boards, and screen sharing.
• Online discussion forums.
• Integration of data resources, databases, and legacy systems.
• Collaboration in a secure environment.
• Search and retrieval capabilities.

Intranets could be designed and configured for a community of the employees. For example sales team may use an Intranet that is private to them. The web-enabled nature of the platform means that it can easily interface with other platforms such as other organisational Intranets, electronic commerce platform, Internet-based purchasing, etc.