More and more companies are turning towards intranet technologies in order to manage their intellectual property, relay corporate information to employees, and to reduce overall duplication of effort.

An Intranet is usually only available from within the company, & not available to the "outside world".

You can think of an intranet as internet technology used for internal corporate publishing and information distribution. Or, you can think of an intranet as your existing network technology optimized for internal corporate publishing and information distribution.

In the midst of the Internet augmentation, a new technology is born which is perhaps more powerful; The application that goes behind the curtains of an organization. This application is known as INTRANET.

• immediate information
• cost effective
• ease of use
• rich format
• versatile
• free of choice
• strong security
• accessibility

Just imagine integrating all corporate, all departmental, all group and all individual communications in a place that provides up to date, instant information to everyone in the organization, wherever and whenever you are!

The structure & ease of access to data helps determine whether it's useful.

The utility of an intranet lies not so much in the technology used to build it as in the hypertext structure that links corporate data into an easy-access, dynamic library. That's what an intranet is: an easy-access, dynamic library of corporate data stored as files rather than fields. Intranet systems can provide the structure required to organize such data and provide it to users on a here-it-is, come-and-get-it basis: Users always know where to look for the information they need, and they can get the information whenever they like.

Is It Worth Building an Intranet?

YES! One problem that many companies face today is many of us are asked (or required) to do more with less. The trick is to make the "less" less overload. A well-designed intranet system can do this.

Intranets can help reduce overload related to the production and distribution of paper-based information. The problem with information on paper is that paper turns that information into cargo. Here are a few indisputable facts about paper cargo:

For example, here's a hastily compiled and obviously incomplete list of the types of paper that many businesspeople deal with in a given day:

• Newsletters
• Job postings
• The phone directory (proof of how hard it is to change something once it's shipped)
• Forms of all types (job applications, performance evaluations, vacation and leave requests, customer complaints)
• Handbooks
• Training materials
• Press releases
• Operating procedures

An intranet can eliminate centralized printing and distribution of all such internal corporate publications.

In addition to all the types of information that corporations publish—forms, reports, manuals, and so on—there's all the stuff that we don't officially publish but that we produce, photocopy, and distribute nonetheless. Meeting notes and slideshows are a common example.

Take the case of the IS manager at a large publishing house that's piloting an intranet system. His organization accidentally discovered an important, quantifiable cost savings for its intranet.

The discovery occurred when the head of his department gave a seminar outlining the IS strategy for the next however-many months. It had been customary to distribute presentations (in this case, 65 pages) to all attendees (in this case 200). Instead, they simply put it on the intranet and saved at least $1,300 (200 people × 65 pages × 10¢ per page).

The key question is: Did they need an intranet to realize these savings? Couldn't they have stuck the presentation into a folder on the server and e-mailed everyone to notify them of the path?

Well, that would have eliminated the photocopying and paper distribution, but someone would have had to e-mail 200 people with the presentation's location. Even more important (since an e-mail list can manage the mailing handily), 200 people would have had to read the message, store it for future reference, and then find it when they needed it.

One of the chief efficiencies that intranets realize is as a standard repository—a public library, if you will—for storing file-based data. By establishing this repository, you guarantee that businesspeople always know where to get the information they need: It's on the intranet. To get new documents into the library, simply load them and add a link. Or, if you get a solid search engine and teach people to use it, load the document and let people find it. You needn't send e-mail. You needn't phone. The latest information is always on the intranet.

Better Information Distribution Through Standards

A Fortune 500 retailer recently discovered one of the real costs associated with information dumping: high employee turnover. In one year, their turnover rate jumped 10 percent over the previous year. The reasons weren't monetary. Many employees took new jobs that paid what their previous jobs paid. Rather, reasons involved such things as a sense that the company was making unreasonable demands. In a formal survey, one problem cited repeatedly was that managers regularly received multiple communications (via e-mail, print, phone) from different sources at different times regarding the same issue, and while some of these communications were essentially identical, others were outright contradictions. The problem, the survey indicated, was in part a communications and information distribution problem.

This company is now streamlining its communications and information distribution system and eliminating redundant communications through an intranet system. To eliminate redundant communications requires a lot more than new software, however. It requires a new, standardized, perhaps even centralized process. The benefit is one-stop information shopping. Whatever information you need, whatever new information you need, the right information is on the intranet.

If web-style hypertext systems add anything truly new to the technology stew, they add the preeminence of standards, because standardization—whichever standard you choose—is necessary for universal, efficient, cost-effective publishing and information distribution.

Microsoft Office 97 has web-style standards built into the products in several ways:

• Office supports HTML—not through add-ins but as a fundamental part of the universe, as natural as XLS and DOC files. You can save Office documents in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) format. You can also open HTML files with any Office 97 product and see the file formatted, as you would in a browser. You can also view the file's source code, as you would in a browser. Essentially, Office products are browsers.
• All MS Office products include the Web toolbar. You can use this toolbar to travel through the Internet, through your corporate network, even through documents on your hard drive.
• Office documents are ActiveX documents. You can view them with web browsers that support ActiveX technology (such as Microsoft Internet Explorer) without converting them to HTML.
• Office supports hypertext links. You can create a hyperlinked web of Office documents without using any internet technology, including HTML.
• Office documents support ActiveX controls. You can use the Control Toolbox toolbar to add such controls directly to spreadsheets, slides, and pages. For example, you can add Microsoft Forms controls—Active X controls that you also use when creating dialog boxes in the Visual Basic Editor—directly to Office documents.

NOTE: As a general rule, you create a more professional interface when you put form controls on forms when developing business applications rather than on documents. Although this rule doesn't necessarily apply when you create online forms (which users fill out online), an online form wizard, complete with instructions, is often easier to use than a document-based form. Web-style forms are, as of this writing, document-based.