The Corporate Intranet

"An intranet allows instant, random, and totally unfettered point-to-point communication between any two nodes on a network."

"Putting intranet applications at the forefront of its web agenda?and recognizing their value?is the first step your organization can take toward developing a more well-rounded business model. "

"Client-server is a way of designing software that takes advantage of the ability to distribute data and processing chores across a network."

"With an intranet, it doesn't take all that much to set up a web site, just a computer and the right tools."

"Web browsers give us a way to communicate with employees, customers, or suppliers, present information, capture feedback, and process the feedback automatically through database or scripting mechanisms."

"The intranet should truly reflect the communications and knowledge output of your entire department or business unit, and the best way to do that is to get everyone to participate."

"The greatest problem with using any large web site is making sure that you haven't missed anything important."

"If your site is dispensing highly sensitive data, especially in a large corporate wide area network that includes remote business partners and joint venture operations, you should consider protection in the form of encryption schemes."

"A document doesn't have to contain HTML to display inside a web browser."

"There may be many cases where it's actually desirable to serve people documents over the web in the same format as the print version."

"A nice feature of the GIF format is your ability to make the background color transparent, so that you see right through the GIF background to the background color of the web document."

"Multimedia is becoming an increasingly popular way to convey information within the corporation, especially for training purposes, where a picture really is worth a thousand words."

"Keep in mind there are many tools you can use to create web forms, including common web-authoring applications such as Netscape Composer or FrontPage."

"One of the reasons?possibly the main reason?Java is so popular is its promise to greatly speed up the process of developing and delivering computer applications to end users. "

"One of the most exciting aspects of the intranet is the way it allows you to leverage existing content stored in legacy databases?all the places where we stored data before the web came along. "

"Customer support will increasingly play an important role on the Internet and extranet."

"To set up your own service, you need a full-time Internet connection, a registered domain name, a valid Internet IP address, a web server, and web content that is prepared in a web-compatible format."

"Once you adopt Internet-style mail standards, you can get everyone communicating on the same wavelength?regardless of the platform they are using. "

"A _pilot project_ is a pump-priming mechanism designed to jump-start the intranet by defining the tools, best practices, standards and guidelines, typical content, and structure of the budding intranet."

"To get everyone working on the same channel, it's necessary to achieve buy-in from both the executive level and the rank-and-file employee level."