Establishing an Intranet
Overview
In our rapidly evolving and highly competitive business environment, quick and easy access to departmental, corporate and customer information is more essential than ever. However, effective communication takes more than just connecting of employees and business partners with vital corporate data. It must also help companies speed information and software to employees and business partners.
To meet these needs, many companies are turning to corporate intranets. These internal networks facilitate communication and collaboration, and are relatively inexpensive to develop, maintain and use. Put simply, intranets bring the functionality of the Internet in-house with the creation of closed, private communities that are constrained to the organization’s boundaries. In the future, intranets are expected to transform the very nature of information dissemination and access for those companies that make the investment to reconfigure their existing networks as intranets.
This article will help you learn more about intranets and how they can help your business. Our discussion begins with a look at the different types of intranets and their specific benefits. Next, we will provide a road map for deciding whether an intranet is right for your business. Finally, we review the steps of setting up and maintaining an intranet and look at their future as "corporate portals."
I. What Is An Intranet?
An intranet is the descriptive term used for the implementation of Internet technologies within a corporate organization, as opposed to the external connection that a firm may have to the global Internet. Intranet implementations are designed to transparently deliver an organization’s informational resources — no matter how big or small — to each individual’s desktop or laptop with minimal cost, time and effort.
Today’s cost-cutting, competitive business environment demands that companies do "more for less." Since we know that internal communication tools are vital to any organization’s core business, and that increased communication is absolutely essential within companies, cutting corners in this arena can threaten the effectiveness of core business operations. Couple this with the increased demands being placed on busy workers to track down important data (for example, a price or product description), and you discover fertile ground for intranet implementation. Any company owner or manager who has employees with Post-It Notes stuck all over their monitors, a stack of unread bulletins and newsletters in their in-baskets, or files upon files of papers that need to be routed between departments, should consider a company intranet.
Basically, an intranet is a system of networks contained within an enterprise. It can be made up of various interlinked local area networks (LANs), and can utilize leased lines in the company’s wide area network (WAN). An intranet resembles a private version of the Internet, utilizing TCP/IP, HTTP, and other Internet protocols. Typically, an intranet includes connections through one or more gateway computers to the outside Internet. The main purpose of an intranet is to share company information and computing resources among employees, though it can also facilitate working in groups and teleconferencing. When part of an intranet is made accessible to customers, partners, suppliers, or others outside the company, that part is called an extranet.
Using intranets or "private Webs" as corporate communications centers is becoming increasingly common in today’s business environment. According to Peter Kent, author of "Poor Richard’s Web Site: Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site," establishing an intranet can be done using relatively pricey technologies, such as Windows NT’s PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol), which, in effect, creates a private network on top of the World Wide Web. Or, Kent says, it can be done inexpensively, using the simple technique of making a Web site private with the help of packages like Microsoft FrontPage, for about $150.
II. What Can An Intranet Do For Me?
Imagine this scenario: Your company has six locations and 200 employees in various departments who need timely access to company news, corporate policy changes, human resource procedures, and a variety of simple, but important, documents such as phone books, product specifications and pricing information. In the past, printed materials would be a logical choice for getting the information out. Things like employee handbooks, price lists and sales brochures would be used - all of which are pricey and time consuming to produce.
Once printed, there is also the question of distribution. What’s the most effective way to get all of that material into the right hands? And, can the information be corrected or updated in a timely fashion? In the past, the first question would have been tough to answer, and the second question probably would have yielded a resounding "no." Today, thanks to the advent of the intranet, those questions are easier to answer.
According to Nick d’Arbeloff of intranet and extranet developer Conjoin, five years into the future, the vast majority of internal company communications are going to take place via an intranet. "We’ve heard Bill Gates talk about the ‘digital nervous system,’ and in a sense, when I hear that term, I think ‘intranet,’" says d’Arbeloff. "An intranet is the internal backbone of an organization to which any and all information can be attached so that employees can get at the information to accomplish their jobs."
Advantages an Intranet Provides
There are several reasons why the Internet technologies have such significant impact on myriad business networking applications:
Information On Demand
The beauty of an intranet is that it lets company employees share documents with colleagues, reduces paperwork and allows for quick access to up-to-date resources. Most importantly, however, a well planned intranet simplifies collaboration, sparing any one person from unnecessary work, like conference room scheduling or emailing documents each time they're updated.
Companies are beginning to realize that intranets provide a simple way for employees to retrieve the information they need, when they need it. For example, at Sun Microsystems, 1,000 internal Web servers provide 250,000 electronic pages of company information to employees and clients. Sun’s intranet provides competitive analysis to employees, price books to salespeople, and field repair data to engineers.
Cost Reduction
Before establishing an intranet in October 1998, Kinko’s printed and mailed much of the company’s operational and procedural information for retail personnel. Such mailings included information bulletins on company activities, marketing updates, employee newsletters, policy memos, and 401(k) briefings. The company’s intranet application, built with OpenText Corp.’s Livelink document management software and an Oracle database, let Kinko's discontinue all manual mailings. Fred Herczeg, vice president of systems development for Kinko's, says the cost savings from the intranet were easy to locate in reduced paper, printing, and postage expenses. They amounted to $500,000 per year, giving the company a 50 percent return on investment on the $1 million installation.
As a result of its intranet implementation, Sun Microsystems estimates that it saves an amazing $175,000 per month from distributing information via the intranet ($21,000 from two internal newsletters, $112,000 from employment benefits packages, and $42,000 from job listings).
Business Development and Productivity
According to Glenn Kelman, vice president of product management and marketing for San Francisco-based Plumtree, Inc., provider of a Web portal for corporate information services, building an intranet often propels companies to a more ambitious business project: Building a dot-com business. "Many firms have empowered people to author content with myriad desktop tools -- from word processors to Web publishing applications to desktop publishing applications -- and so many firms have an abundance of legacy information in computer systems that were only accessible to technicians," Kelman explains. "The real challenge lies in joining what knowledge workers are creating on the desktop with what’s available in the back office, then integrating that with the Internet to create one simple, rich experience that can help employees be more productive."
Kelman adds that most firms that are building intranets also want to lower the perceived barriers between internal and external business affairs: "They want employees to be more market aware about what’s going on outside the firm, and because the intranet inevitably becomes a resource for both partners and customers. The inside sees out and vice versa. As a result, the whole business is transformed."
Unlimited Accessibility
Another big advantage of using an intranet, Kelman says, involves its facilitation of decentralized decision making. This occurs because everyone has access to information, and there is no reliance on a limited number of individuals who have access to different types of information from different departments within the company. Because of "less latency time in decision making, businesses become more responsive and competitive," Kelman adds. "Intranets also foster better strategic cohesion because management has a simple, consistent way of keeping everyone up to speed on what’s going on in the company. This is generally under-recognized by vendors, but in speaking to management personnel, it’s one of the key driving factors."
Intranets also serve to eliminate the "paper trails" that are so prevalent in today’s offices.
"If you have a paper office, where forms are transferred from department to department, an intranet is perfect because the information instead stays on a server where people can go, via their browser, to look at," says Bill Mosher, senior account manager for Rway Communications, a Web design and hosting firm. "With an intranet, employees are able to download the forms and print them out, thus creating a paperless office. Obviously, from a return on investment standpoint, they’re saving both money and time."
Speaking of investment, intranet prices vary widely according to their complexity. For custom design and development, prices can range from $50,000 to over $100,000. "It really depends on how much you try to tackle with your intranet," says Kelman.
III. Different Types of Intranets
Companies in industries ranging from aerospace to entertainment to banking to manufacturing have already implemented intranets and report significant savings in operations costs and improvements in staff productivity. Although the range of applications that can be developed to meet industry-specific or general needs is virtually limitless, intranet applications usually fit into one of three categories:
1. Communication Tool -- Because communication occurs on a one-to-many basis between teams, departments or entire corporations, posting of information on Web pages is a great way to reduce bulky, easily outdated paper documents. This use of an intranet brings an immediate pay back to organizations, eliminating the costs of producing, printing and shipping vast amounts of corporate information.
2. Applications Enabler -- Intranets serve to enable two-way interactions, such as logging help desk requests or enrolling for benefits. Whether an employee needs to develop a report, analyze data or learn about the company’s customers, using Web technology linked to legacy data can be an intuitive and efficient alternative to the frustrations of repeated phone calls or the pushing of paper between departments.
3. Collaboration Facilitator -- This type of intranet includes newsgroups that facilitate direct exchanges of information between members, with posted information available to others, resulting in a corporate "knowledge base." People subscribe and can view a screen with subject lines, authors and news article numbers. Each of these items is the beginning of a "thread" that starts when someone sends out an article or email; then readers can trace these threads deeper as they wish.
For an example of how any or all of these different types of intranets can facilitate business communications, look no further than sales and marketing departments. These groups face at least one major challenge: how to effectively deliver up-to-date reference information to a geographically distributed group of people. Having just the right information at the right moment can make a sale happen, and lacking that information can mean losing the deal to a competitor. An intranet can give immediate access to information like product specs, sales leads, lists of key customers and more.
At Compaq Computers, developing a "first generation" intranet meant opening a vault of information to 25,000 individuals worldwide (internal sales and marketing personnel and outside sales reps). After implementing the intranet, Conjoin’s Nick d’Arbeloff says the company soon become a "victim of its own success." He explains: "We came in and deployed a new intranet at Compaq recently, since theirs had become quite popular with their outside sales force. As a result of their initial implementation, those employees began clambering for more functionality, and the field marketing and IT professionals who created it were overwhelmed by the resource demands of maintaining it alone."
In a similar example, Dun-Agway, a northeast cooperative, recently realized the importance of an intranet in disseminating information quickly to update groups of people. The company has a geographically dispersed board of directors, and getting all ten of them on the "same page" is a constant challenge. "Prior to their implementing an intranet, they used paper documents or email, and it got time consuming," says Rway’s Bill Mosher, whose firm handled the implementation of Dun-Agway’s intranet. "Their board members need to review big reports -- sometimes 20-40 pages in length -- and it was time-consuming for an administrator to pull all of that together. Now, they can put it on the intranet and let them know it’s there for them, and they can review the information at their convenience."
IV. Questions To Ask Before Setting Up an Intranet
When the time comes to set up your own intranet, there are basically two broad hosting options to choose from:
An In-House Intranet: Keeping the intranet within your own office is an option if you have the physical resources and expertise to support it. According to experts, an in-house intranet offers the most security, assuming you protect it from outside access with a firewall.
A Hosted Intranet: Outsourcing your intranet to an ISP may be the best option if your company’s IT staff is either already overtaxed or nonexistent. Though an ISP-hosted intranet doesn’t require the support that an in-house system does, you will still need someone with time and expertise to handle some of the setup and ongoing maintenance. Hosting with a service lets you concentrate on collaboration, and leave the data and backups to the pros. Outsourcing will also let you avoid taxing your network with the additional load of an intranet. On average, the cost of hosting with a service ranges from $25 to $100 per month, depending on your needs.
Back to Outline
V. Setting Up An Intranet
At PricewaterhouseCoopers, roughly half of the firm’s 160,000 employees use notebook computers, and the proportion of notebook to desktop PC users is on the rise. To accommodate those users — especially those who work from the road and travel frequently to other countries — the firm is currently establishing a global network that will let employees communicate among its 900 offices.
Through the establishment of an intranet, PricewaterhouseCoopers is finding ways to manage the critical company data that travels between notebooks and company offices. When complete, the intranet will include the implementation of a virtual private network (VPN, a private network within a public network) to provide notebook users with secure access to its data. The firm is testing this VPN at offices in North America and is currently preparing to roll out the network to 70,000 workers in North America and Great Britain at the rate of 3,000 per week.
Overseas companies are also cashing in on the intranet as a business tool. Omnitel, a mobile telecommunications company operating in Italy, recently chose Global Knowledge Network to train 1,000 employees throughout Italy via a company intranet. The system’s framework enables a broad range of employees, including secretaries and technical professionals, to evaluate their current competency on productivity tools, analyze their training needs, provide customized instruction plans and courses online.
"We needed a way to train large numbers of employees on software that would make them more productive, but we didn't want to diminish our productivity by taking people away from their work to attend training classes," says Antonio Zaffaroni, director of human resources development at Omnitel. Through the system, employees first evaluate themselves through "profiles" of their particular work and through a database of activities, skills, knowledge and contexts that relate to that work. The evaluation lets employees identify competency gaps and receive an instruction plan to fill those gaps. Users can also visit "virtual classrooms" to receive all the benefits normally associated with classroom training.
Consider these ten steps to intranet creation and utilization:
Back to Outline
VI. Maintaining An Intranet
While setting up and rolling out your intranet is an important step in its implementation, maintaining it is absolutely critical. An intranet that doesn’t present fresh, important content, archive previous content for easy access, and include the most current information available will be ineffective. On the other hand, one which gives employees the "best of the best" in terms of information and timeliness will be well worth the effort.
"It’s best to have a decentralized model that allows people to contribute content, along with some sort of workflow system for centralizing control over the submissions," says Kelman. "We’ve noticed that you can’t centralize content authorship because part of what companies are trying to do is empower more people to contribute to the general good. At the same time, if you allow everyone to contribute, you end up with chaos. To solve the problem, implement a process whereby business experts - and not information technology experts — control different areas of the intranet by reviewing and approving the submissions and contributions that others are making."
In addition, Kelman says, it’s important to develop a "knock-out punch": "An incremental approach to intranets and extranets really isn’t very successful. You can focus on a user community that you want to serve, but you have to serve it — however small — very well. The trend I’ve noticed is that an ambitious project with a broad user community is a half-baked attempt that no one finds compelling and leads to an abandoned site."
To make an intranet compelling, Kelman advises focusing on an audience that really matters, while also creating an extranet in tandem; and finding a business audience served by the intranet that’s really valuable to the company. "Don’t create an intranet solely for your marketing department," he advises. "They don’t make the company money, but your salespeople and partners do, so be sure to [include them] in your audience."
Removing or archiving outdated content on an intranet is just as important as keeping it fresh and current. For example, d’Arbeloff says when his firm was starting out, he and his partners spent a lot of time touring intranets and Lotus Notes sites and quickly realized that these environments have a tendency to become "a morass of obsolete, irrelevant information very quickly." In other words, he says, content becomes stale and proliferates to the point where it becomes very hard to find anything of value, like a needle in a growing haystack. "For this reason, we’ve spent a lot of time on our Content Lifecycle Management, applying expiration dates, monitoring traffic and rating content," d’Arbeloff explains. "It can monitor which documents are aging, which aren’t being used, or which are rated poorly. In this self-cleaning environment, such documents are retired into an archive. The whole notion of pruning back content from an intranet is very important. The problem is that monitoring all of that content and deciding what’s relevant and what’s not can be resource intensive."
VII. Intranet Security
When developing and implementing an intranet, companies should start with a good foundation of effective security measures. That means implementing strong security policies and procedures, and making security an intrinsic part of daily network operations.
One of the main considerations is whether you want to connect your intranet with the Internet. Typically, larger companies allow users within their intranet to access the public Internet through a firewall, a secure interface between the Internet and the local network. However, "once you implement an intranet and opened it up to, say, a sales force that operates away from the company’s home base, you’ve opened up your internal network to possible security breaches," says Rway’s Mosher. Those breaches occur because at every connection or switching interface users have the ability to copy, erase or transfer sensitive data. Confidential or mission-critical information such as turnover, price lists and strategy can be used improperly if they fall into the wrong person’s hands -- like your competitors.
Firewall-equipped servers have the ability to screen messages and monitor traffic in both directions, but they should not be considered the cure-all to security problems, especially in situations where very sensitive information is hosted. If you plan to post sales data or company financials on your intranet, consider the following additional security measures:
To maintain a secure environment for your intranet, you’ll want to constantly review security procedures, and not simply expect your firewall to prevent every problem. This can mean providing access by the appropriate personnel to the correct information, while at the same time barring access to all others. Most popular Web servers today allow such access configuration on a user/group/realm basis, while some allow the systems administrator to limit access rights by specific Internet Protocol (IP) address for individual pages. For example, this capability would allow the systems administrator to set access to financial records or personnel files only for the personal computer in the CEO's office.
Access can also be barred to all other users or groups, keeping unauthorized personnel from gaining access to sensitive financial, company or personnel records. System Options International's Purveyor's IntraServer, for example, allows for the configuration of access control using the File Manager and clicking on files, directories or virtual paths. Users and groups can be managed within Purveyor's database, the Windows NT user registry database or even an external database like Microsoft Access.
Security can include encryption at several levels. Most Web servers offer encryption for communications between the server and browser, effectively scrambling the message and keeping it from interception. Those employees who are entitled to view the information are equipped with software that reads the encrypted message and translates it into a readable format. Encryption and similar issues can be handled by the myriad of software programs available on the market, including products from Internet Security Systems, Solucom, Inc. and the various other IT vendors that specialize in intranet security for business communication.
VIII. Corporate Portals: Intranets of the Near Future
Intranets have proved themselves as a handy way to share internal company information, but what’s next? According to Joshua Walker, an analyst with Forrester Research, Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., intranets are not just about searching internal documents. The concept is rapidly evolving into corporate intranet "portals." "Corporate intranet portals [include] all of the intranet services that you have in your company [data and applications], plus custom applications, groupware and workflow processes," says Walker, who adds that "navigation services" complement the original content you create. "That’s the stuff companies have to build to make their intranets more valuable."
Think of a corporate portal as a personalized version of a Web directory like Yahoo! Just as the major Internet portals make it easier to find information on the Internet, an intranet can include the same type of directory and search capability for your local area networks. Corporate portals facilitate intelligent browsing and raw searching of local information about the organization's products, customers and competitors.
"What we’re seeing is companies who really want a Web portal for corporate information," says Kelman. "It’s more than simply converting content to HTML — it’s offering a front page that’s a Web page — a personalized view of the available information from a host of different systems for each employee. A portal project tends to be a more ambitious project than just a simple intranet, which can be done with a simple document publishing tool."
According to Kelman, these emerging systems are being touted as the "second generation intranets." "The question has become, ‘How can I provide a more compelling, comprehensive experience?’ How can the Web be the way that I do business?’ This type of project requires a deeper commitment than just taking a document and converting it to HTML from MS Word."
One recent Plumtree customer deciding to use an intranet portal was Monsanto Corp.’s Nutrition and Consumer Products Sector. They used the corporate portal to develop their intranet as a gateway to all the important information available on the corporate network. The Nutrition Sector develops and brings to market food ingredients and products such as Equal and Nutrasweet. The Sector employs over 2,000 research, marketing, operations, and administrative personnel worldwide — the perfect audience for an effective, all-encompassing corporate portal.
For starters, the company’s nutrition sector sought to create an open culture in which employees understood their work in the context of the entire sector's strategic directives, and could share information electronically to be more productive. As an early Web enthusiast, Monsanto Nutrition recognized the power of the intranet as a portal to all the strategic information available on the corporate network, but lacked an organized framework for integrating the disparate sources of content key to their business: Large volumes of strategic documents, sales discussions and performance metrics in Lotus Notes databases, plus information about competitors and customers from the Internet.
By publishing information from different sources to the intranet, the company sought to create a single, simple, comprehensive view of all the information related to employees’ work, that everyone could use regardless of his or her level of technical expertise. John Ferrari, the Sector’s process and technology manager, said "We wanted the intranet to be the primary tool that employees use to get the stuff that they need, but we didn't want to create a Webmaster blockade." According to Kelman, because Monsanto competes in a rapidly changing, information-intensive market, administrators responsible for manually identifying and publishing intranet content could never keep pace with the overwhelming volume of data that became available each week.
With their new corporate portal, Monsanto users had access to an organized Yahoo!-style interface for accessing Web information about competitors, nutrition and health, as well as key strategy documents stored as Word or PowerPoint files, or as attachments in a Lotus Notes database. The portal also delivered personalized briefings to update Monsanto users about key events, such as a product launch from a major competitor. These briefings summarized, in a single Web page, all the information relevant to users' work, with links to articles, documents, announcements, and other content on the network. Kelman adds: "As a result of the installation, Monsanto intranet users spent less time browsing the network for information, and leveraged their peers' work to be more productive."
IX. Resources
Books
Jennifer Stone Gonzalez, "The 21st Century Intranet" (Prentice Hall, 1998)
John Fronckowiak, "Building an Intranet for Dummies" (IDG Books, 1997)
Mitra Miller, et. al., "Managing the Corporate Intranet" (John Wiley & Sons, 1998)
Peter Dyson, "The ABCs of Intranets" (Sybex, 1997)
Tyson Greer, "Understanding Intranets" (Microsoft Press, 1998)
Peter Kent, "Poor Richard’s Web Site: Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site" (Top Floor Publishing, 1998)
Development Software
ActionPlan: Netmosphere's project-management system lets users plan and track project tasks in real time.
Castanet: Marimba’s suite of products lets companies distribute, manage, and maintain critical applications over intranets, extranets, and the Internet.
Netshow Services: The streaming-media portion of Microsoft's Window Media Technologies helps users create audio and video content on intranets and extranets.
PowerBuilder with WebPB: Sybase's GUI development tool helps users create client-server applications over intranets, extranets and the Internet.
Shockwave: Macromedia's multimedia solution lets users view streaming content via a Web browser.
Web Server Software
Apache works on OS/2 and UNIX platforms. This is the most popular choice for Web servers on the Internet.
Microsoft Internet Information Server is now bundled with Windows NT 4.0. And, Microsoft FrontPage comes with its own Web server for Windows 95, 98, 2000 and NT.
Novell's NetWare Web Server costs around $995.
Netscape's FastTrack server is priced at $295; there are versions for Windows 95, 95, 2000, NT, and various flavors of UNIX. Designed for easy installation and use.
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