Introducing the INTRAnet

Proprietary network technologies are history. If you want to survive, look at INTRAnets - very, very seriously

"Could you pick up my messages please?"

"Please get me a printout of the latest sales figures"

"I think we should print a company-wide newsletter"

"Please put this on the notice board"

Where do you think you get to hear the above statements?

Right, in the technically challenged CEO's office.

It is a crying shame that in a technically advanced 21st century style world of corporate communication technology, CEOs and top management still rely on 17th century technology for their decision support material.

This can be most terrifying when you hear people talking about "trickle down" of technology, meaning that it is used at the highest levels first, and eventually by the entire company. Assuming that this is true for a company, one can see trouble ahead.

In reality, this "trickle-down" of technology usage does not exist - in fact "Trickle Up" is probably more like it.

But even trickle up does not seem to reach the places where it would really make a difference - at the top management and CEO levels.

One of the biggest stumble-blocks has always been the learning curve - CEOs often just simply do not have the time to learn to use the ever-changing applications that the rest of the company may be using. Nor do they wish to look silly asking someone, so they dismiss it with a "I pay people to do this for me".

But it need not be like this!

A perfect world

You, the CEO, walk into your office. You switch on your PC, which starts up the single application available on it that interfaces with all the data-sources you need to refer to. A single front end that lets you, at a click of a mouse button, access information, reports and data generated by your company that you can use in your decision making process.

You choose to see this month's sales figures. Click. There they are. Let's have a look at last month's sales figures to judge performance. Click. OK, now let's review how the competition has been doing in the same period. Click.

OK, now let's check the notice board for any items of interest. Click. Interesting, the specs for the new model of a product are now finalised, and are open to comment. More details available here...Click. Someone has also put up reviews of the competition's equivalent product. Click.

The latest issue of the company's newsletter is now available. Click. Finance department has written a strongly worded article about telephone costs of the company. Details available here...Click. Ouch, apparently the marketing department is the biggest offender on this front. A breakup of the costs is available...Click. Hmmm, this needs a memo right from the top. A direct link to the internal e-mail system is available, all it requires is a ...Click.

Time to check out the messages received. Click, and up comes the integrated e-mail system, which quickly retrieves all messages and displays them. Hmmm, lots of it - let's sort this on basis of the sender...Click. OK, now one can conveniently read the messages, and reply to the ones that demand immediate attention. Someone else could handle some of them better. Click to forward the message to this person, along with a few covering comments.

Utopia? Science Fiction?

In fact, this is the real world - this is something you can do today, implementing it at minimal cost. What we have just described is all possible using technology that first evolved on the Internet, but very quickly moved into the closed perimeters of the office, to become known as The INTRAnet.

A little bit of history

To understand where the INTRAnet came from, we must first look at its origins: the mother of all networks - the Internet.

Though many presume the Internet to be a fairly recent phenomenon, it actually started off in the late 1960's, and has been growing ever since. But until the early 1990's, few people actually used the Internet for anything even remotely resembling business.

In 1993, things changed a lot, with the introduction of a new technology, called the World Wide Web. Actually, this technology wasn't actually new - it just bound together existing technologies into a new form. But the Web (as it is referred to today) made a startling difference to the usage of the Internet - it was "human compatible" and could be used by just about anyone without any formal training.

Instead of arcane, text based Unix commands and heavily technical operations, all a user needed to get going was a computer of some sort. Then he needed an Internet connection, a mouse, and one single application that allowed access to all the information that made the Internet the biggest information source in history - the Web Browser.

To navigate the Web, this was sufficient - even the keyboard (every CEO's nightmare) became an optional accessory, used only very rarely. It was entirely possible to search for, and find, useful information on the Web without so much as touching the keyboard!

This was every CEO's dream come true. Many of them, who so far had shied away from using computers themselves in the office, happily set up and used a computer at home to access the Internet.

The Net within…

It wasn't long before they began wondering why they couldn't use this kind of technology back at the office. If corporate information would be this easy to find, access and use, they wouldn't hesitate to use computers at work, too.

The ease by which their bosses took to the World Wide Web wasn't lost on the Information Systems people who were responsible for delivering company information to the management. And even the vendors who were so far catering to the Internet in terms of software and hardware soon realised that a massive new field was opening up here - the use of Internet technology to deliver internal information over the local area network.

And with that, the concept of the INTRAnet was born.

Once the idea was in place, setting things up was so simple, it seemed ridiculous that no one had thought of it before.

Most companies already had LANs in place. Effectively, that meant that all the required hardware was already up and running. All that was needed were the applications, and a bit of standardisation.

The main application (at least the front end) was already in place, and had gained acceptance - the Web Browser. And Netscape and Microsoft were just falling over themselves producing newer and more powerful versions, at costs that ranged from free to about $50 - laughable, considering the cost of most corporate applications.

The backend (the web server) was a different story - they were available, but at pretty high costs, and usually not for "low end" platforms like PCs or PC servers. The Internet was built around powerful Unix machines such as the powerful workstations and servers produced by Sun, and these machines meant big bucks. Naturally, applications written for them were priced proportionally.

But that soon changed. Companies like Netscape started producing web server software for the PC platform (typically for Windows NT or Windows 95), and Microsoft, in recent times, even bundles and automatically installs a web server with Windows NT.

More pieces falling into place.

The final hurdle was the protocol used for communication on the network. The Internet uses the protocol known as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), while most LANs used Novell's IPX or Microsoft's NETBEUI. The traditional operating systems used on the user's PCs (DOS or Windows 3.x) did not include any network support, and definitely not TCP/IP.

The arrival of Windows 95 changed all that. For one, it included TCP/IP as a natively installable network protocol, and, even better, allowed the simultaneous use of several protocols at once, including IPX, NETBEUI and TCP/IP.

That was the clincher. Every piece was now in place, and very soon, the first few internal web pages started making their appearance on corporate LANs.

The INTRAnet had arrived.

Growing Up

As the demand for INTRAnet technology implementations grew in corporate circles, so did the demand for applications that catered to this new field.

The absence of tools designed specifically for this market was no issue at all. Since INTRAnets employed exactly the same technologies used on the Internet, and with the incredible growth experienced by the Internet itself, applications were available in abundance, and their numbers grew every passing day.

The same HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language - the code used for building web pages) editors used to design those glorious web pages for the Internet were used for the production of in-house web pages. The same web browsers, the same tools and utilities…this market was exploding.

It didn't take long for software companies to realise which side of the bread was buttered. As new versions of their applications (word processors, spreadsheets, database programs) started appearing, they brought with them built-in Internet (and thereby INTRAnet) capabilities. No longer was it necessary to hand-code an HTML page from existing text. To produce a web page from an existing word-processing document, all the user had to do was to save the document as HTML, and the job was done!

Internet v/s INTRAnet

Trying to differentiate the Internet from INTRAnets is more or less an exercise in futility. The two use the same technology, the same applications and the same concepts - one could say that they are identical twins, born four years apart.

But there are subtle differences that differentiate the two.

The biggest difference is the issue of bandwidth.

The Internet is forever starved of bandwidth - things just don't seem to move fast enough. Users are typically connected to the Internet using 28.8K dialup modems, 64K/128K ISDN and leased lines or 1.5mbps T1 lines. Therefore, the design of the network needs to include this bandwidth factor - make things too big, and they slow down when they hit the bottlenecks of the Internet.

In sharp contrast, INTRAnets have more than enough bandwidth available to them. Even the slowest LAN today boasts of 10mbps Ethernet speeds, while more modern LANs offer 100mbps and faster speeds.

Therefore, and application designed to run fast on the Internet will be greased lightning on an INTRAnet.

However, the opposite is not always true. An application, or a heavy duty, multimedia rich HTML page may work just fine on an INTRAnet, but could choke on the Internet's lack of bandwidth.

The other difference is, of course, accessibility and security. The Internet is an open place - anything published there is essentially for public viewing. INTRAnet based information, on the other hand, is secured and contained within the company - the information is not accessible to people on the outside. This is an important difference - without it, the INTRAnet would become meaningless as one would not be able to trust it to protect the information it contains from snoopers, competition and other prying eyes.

The cheque is in the mail

Most people assume that the term "INTRAnet" essentially means an in-house website.

In reality, that is not true. Just like the Internet does not consist of by the World Wide Web alone, INTRAnets incorporate many technologies.

The most powerful one, and the one that really makes an impact that can be measured in real money, is the concept of in-house electronic mail.

In the past, electronic mail on the LAN was an expensive affair. Using proprietary products from various vendors, it was possible to establish an e-mail network, but it would be anything but "standards based". No product could interact with another without expensive add-ons, and no product worked quite the same way.

The Internet, and thereby INTRAnets, changed all that. The Internet uses just one mail protocol (SMTP - Simple Mail Transport Protocol), and it is in use worldwide. It is, in fact, as much a standard as TCP/IP is today for networking. SMTP mail server software made by different vendors use the same protocol, and therefore can interact effortlessly.

SMTP based e-mail also does away with proprietary front-ends and closed mail architecture, and slashes prices to almost nothing. One of the most popular e-mail applications, Eudora, is free for personal use, while Windows 95 incorporates the Exchange Client for free. Any e-mail program can be deployed in an Internet or INTRAnet setup, provided it follows SMTP for mail delivery (and a similar protocol, POP3, for mail receipt by end-users). In fact, most web browsers today incorporate e-mail capabilities, rapidly evolving into that dream scenario - "one application does it all".

Setting up an in-house e-mail server is usually a question of picking up any of the many offerings available today (typically costing far less than their proprietary predecessors.) This is then installed on one of the LAN servers (usually, a dedicated machine is not required), and pointing the e-mail client software on the users' machines to that server.

In fact, provided you have a spare machine available for the purpose, you can use a freeware operating system like Linux (a Unix-like operating system) as a mail server for free! Linux includes all required programs, server software, etc. This is a solution we at Exocore Consulting often resort to, resulting in massive short term and long term savings for our clients.

The other major advantage that immediately emerges is the fact that external (i.e. Internet) mail can easily be linked into the internal setup, thereby creating a completely seamless solution. No more worrying about compatibility issues, or expensive gateways!

The Future: Full Service INTRAnets

While the basic concept of INTRAnets incorporate specific functionality, such as internal web services, file transfers and electronic mail, things are rapidly moving beyond that.

Already, INTRAnets are evolving towards offering services that have traditionally been the domain of proprietary Network Operating Systems such as Novell NetWare and Microsoft Windows NT, including file and print services. These enhanced INTRAnets are now becoming known as "Full Service INTRAnets".

Forrester Research defines a Full Service INTRAnet as follows:

"A corporate TCP/IP network which delivers reliable, feature-rich applications that share five core, standards-based services -- directory, e-mail, file, print, and network management. "

This may sound futuristic, but as the following timeline shows, it is already work in progress.

So what does all this mean? If you guessed "non-proprietary networks" and "vendor independence", you are well on your way to realising the benefits of INTRAnets.

Traditionally the incompatibility between services offered by proprietary network operating systems from different vendors is so great, it isn't funny. Too many systems managers have had to battle with issues ranging from simple file exchange (different network operating systems use different file access methods) to planning for growth (proprietary NOSs translate into big bucks for the vendor at the higher end).

By embracing standards (true standards, not "vendor defined wannabe standards"), the INTRAnet gives managers the freedom to look elsewhere for solutions, without having to worry about compatibility between existing setups and those in the future.

The implementation of an INTRAnet

If you are at this point not quite convinced about the feasibility of INTRAnets, then this point may just do it:

Implementing an INTRAnet today does not require doses of black magic. As the accompanying articles about migrating to INTRAnets will show you, it is simplicity in itself, with absolutely minimum intrusion into your existing setup. Given a basic LAN, you can deploy a basic INTRAnet overnight on top of your existing facilities, and can graduate to a "Full Service" INTRAnet as you get comfortable with it.

Considering all the advantages, the only thing one can say is what has been nicely summarised by Forrester Research:

"By 2000, smart companies will utilise the Full Service Intranet for all the networking services they used to rely on proprietary NOS to provide. Companies that fail to grasp this will be at a significant competitive disadvantage."
– Forrester Report (March 1996)