What is an Intranet?
In essence, an intranet is a business’ own private website. It is a private business network that uses the same underlying structure and network protocols as the internet and is protected from unauthorised users by a firewall. Intranets enhance existing communication between employees, and provide a common knowledge base and storage area for everyone in your business. They also provide users with easy access to company data, systems and email from their desktops. Because intranets are secure and easily accessible via the internet, they enable staff to do work from any location simply by using a web browser. This can help small businesses to be flexible and control office overheads by allowing employees to work from almost any location, including their home and customer sites. Other types of intranet are available that merge the regular features of intranets with those often found in software such as Microsoft Office. These are known as online offices or web offices. Creating a web offi
The explosion of the World Wide Web is due to the world-wide acceptance of a common transport (TCP/IP), server standard (HTTP), and markup language (HTML). Many corporations have discovered that these same technologies can be used for internal client/server applications with the same ease that they are used on the Internet. Thus was born the concept of the “Intranet”: the use of Internet technologies for implementing internal client/server applications. One key advantage of Web-based intranets is that the problem of managing code on the client is greatly reduced. Assuming a standard browser on the desktop, all changes to user interface and functionality can be done by changing code on the HTTP server. Compare this with the cost of updating client code on 2,000 desktops. A second advantage is that if the corporation is already using the Internet, no additional code needs to be licensed or installed on client desktops. To the user, the internal and external information servers appear int
