An intranet is a private network contained within an enterprise that is used

to securely share company information and computing resources among

employees. An intranet can also be used to facilitate working in groups
and teleconferences.

Intranets increase communication within an organization by allowing

employees to easily access important information, links, applications and
forms as well as databases that can provide company records. Security
can also be increased within the intranet by establishing a database that
maintains all of the usernames of people who are allowed access to the
network.

Intranets began to appear in a range of larger organizations from 1994.

Uses of the intranet

Potential uses of an intranet include:

 Streamlining everyday activities by making repeated tasks more feasible.

 Centralizing and managing important information and company data in a single

database.

 Making collaboration easier since information can be shared across the entire
network.

 Providing personalized content to employees based on their role within the

company.

 Improving internal communication by making employee directories, company

news and organization charts readily available.

 Providing fast and easy access to information about company policies, benefits
and updates.
Benefits[edit]
 Workforce productivity: Intranets can help users to locate and view
information faster and use applications relevant to their roles and
responsibilities. With the help of a web browser interface, users can
access data held in any database the organization wants to make
available, anytime
 Time: Intranets allow organizations to distribute information to employees
on an as-needed basis
 Communication: Intranets can serve as powerful tools for communication
within an organization, vertically strategic initiatives that have a global
reach throughout the organization.
 Web publishing allows cumbersome corporate knowledge to be
maintained and easily accessed throughout the company using Web
technologies.[8] Examples include: employee manuals, benefits documents,
company policies, business standards, news feeds, and even training, can
be accessed using common Internet standards (Acrobat files, Flash files
 Business operations and management:
 Workflow - a collective term that reduces delay, such as automating
meeting scheduling and vacation planning[9]
 Cost-effective: Users can view information and data via web-browser
rather than maintaining physical documents.[7]
 Enhance collaboration: Information is easily accessible by all authorised
users, which enables teamwork. [10].
 Cross-platform capability: Standards-compliant web browsers are
available for Windows, Mac, and UNIX.
 Immediate updates:
 Improves Corporate Cultures
How the intranet works

A secure and reliable intranet requires a web server that is responsible for
managing all requests for files hosted on the server, finding the requested file and
delivering it to the appropriate computer. A content management system (CMS)
should also be set up to control the creation, publication and management of
content on the intranet.

An intranet may also consist of many interlinked local area networks (LANs) as
well as leased lines in the wide area network (WAN). It uses TCP/IP, HTTP, and
other Internet protocols (IP). Typically, an intranet includes connections through
one or more gateway computers to the outside Internet.

An employee who wants to access the intranet must have a special network
password and be connected to the LAN. However, an employee working remotely
can gain access to the intranet through a virtual private network (VPN). The VPN
allows users who are not actually connected to the required LAN to sign into the
intranet and access all the same information and functions that would be available
had they been connected to the LAN.

Firewall software is essential to the security of an organization's intranet; it stands

between the outside Internet and the private intranet. The firewall will monitor all
incoming and outgoing data packets to confirm they do not contain unauthorized or
suspicious requests, ensuring malware and other malicious attacks do not leak into
the intranet. When a segment of an intranet is made accessible to customers,
partners, suppliers, or others outside the company, that segment becomes part of
an extranet. The firewall is especially important for intranet networks that include
extranet extensions.

The intranet generally looks like a private version of the Internet. With tunneling,
companies can send private messages through the public network while using
special encryption/decryption and other security safeguards to connect one part of
their intranet to another.
Some challenges faced when using an intranet include:

 A lack of intranet users and therefore a lack of the content, communications

and documents that are necessary to make the intranet beneficial.

 A loss of interest amongst users after the initial excitement and novelty of the
intranet has worn off, also resulting in a lack of content.

 Limited user support due to the high cost of adding a support team to the
payroll. As a result, when the inevitable software bugs or other issues arise,
there is no one to resolve the problems.

 Continuous examinations and maintenance checks are required to ensure the

network is running properly and does not become outdated with old and
irrelevant content.

 A lack of proper ownership or ownership being distributed amongst various

departments. This complicates the network and makes it difficult to place
responsibility in one place.

The biggest difference between the Internet and intranet is that the Internet can be
accessed by anyone from anywhere, whereas the intranet can only be accessed by a
specific group of people who possess an authenticated login and are connected to
the required LAN or VPN. Beyond that, there are several more simple distinctions,
such as:

The Internet works on a public network while the intranet works on a private
network.

 The public Internet is not as safe as the private intranet.

 The Internet can have unlimited users while the intranet has a limited amount.

 Information on the Internet is unlimited and available to anyone while

information on an intranet is limited and only available to users with authorized
access to the intranet network.
A short history of intranets and what's next with social, mobile and
cloud

2012-09-18
The history of the Internet, the World Wide Web and corporate intranets
share a common heritage. Some where along the way intranets parted
way, but the trinity of social, mobile and cloud is bringing them back
together again. Before we look at what this means for intranets, I want
to spend some time considering their history.

In this post:

 Where did intranets comes from?

 What is an intranet?

 But intranets are Websites, not email and videoconferencing?

 Aren't intranets different today?

 What does social, mobile and cloud mean for intranets?

 What next?

Where did intranets comes from?

The history of intranets is very much tied to that of the rest of the Web.
When Tim Berners-Lee and his collaborators first proposed the idea that
became the World Wide Web in 1989, he wanted to create a hypertext
system that would allow users to:

"link and access information of various kinds… [to overcome] current

incompatibilities of the platforms and tools."

However, they had no intention of implementing any kind of

sophisticated security or access control system. In fact, the eventual aim
was to allow what we would now recognise as wiki-style authorship of
content because:
"Making it easy to change the web is thus the key to avoiding obsolete
information."

So when Berners-Lee released a program called "WorldWideWeb" in

1991, it was conceived simply as a means to this end rather than as a
tool that would be used specifically for either public or private hypertext
networks.

But it was the release of the Mosaic Web browser in 1993 that was the
catalyst for bringing the World Wide Web to life - in October
1994, Wired magazine described the revolutionary paradigm that the
graphical Web browser created:

Mosaic is the celebrated graphical "browser" that allows users to travel

through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click
interface. Mosaic's charming appearance encourages users to load their
own documents onto the Net, including color photos, sound bites, video
clips, and hypertext "links" to other documents. By following the links -
click, and the linked document appears - you can travel through the
online world along paths of whim and intuition.

In contrast, the Gopher protocol was simple to implement and organised

information in a familiar file system hierarchy, but was heavily text
orientated.

The popularity of the World Wide Web also helped to drive the eventual
dominance of the Internet Protocol (IP) stack over other proprietary
networking protocols, so both the Internet and private computer
networks ended up using the same basic technologies for connecting
systems and computers together.

What is an intranet?

At this point - circa 1994-1996 - the first intranets were analogous to the
Internet as a networking environment, rather than the World Wide Web
which was an information system.

This isn't to say there wasn't any confusion about the terminology, even
when intranets first appeared - Rawn Shah explained in SunWorld:
Most people use this word to indicate a network within the corporation.
Supposedly, all the components of your network-- workstations, servers,
routers, switches, hubs, modem banks, printers, applications, operating
systems, and everything else that is not connected to an "outside
network"-- constitute your intranet. In this case we will consider the
"outside network" to be public online services and the Internet.

In fact, many early "intranet" solutions offered a range of features that

included not just a Web server, but email and other groupware-like
features (in direct competition with Lotus Notes).

For example, in 1996 Frontier Software launched their "Intranet Genie"

package, which offered a:

"Web server; a mail server based on the protocols SMTP, POP, and
S/MIME; a news server for discussions, based on the Network News
Transfer Protocol (NNTP); a Domain Name Server (DNS)"

Netscape - then a prime player in the Internet & intranet gold rush -
outlined their vision for a "full service intranet", which encompassed:

user services, which provide resources and applications for end users,
and network services, which help tie together and run the overall
network environment.

For end-users, the base line or 'native' intranet included:

 Email

 Groupware and team collaboration

 Real-time audio and video communication

 Information publishing and sharing

 Navigation and full-text indexing and searching

 Directories of people and things

Microsoft also joined the competition, with its own email and Web-
enabled server and Web browser stack, and Lotus started to integrate the
Web into what became Lotus Domino. Much later, in 2001, Microsoft
also launched SharePoint.

But intranets are Websites, not email and videoconferencing?

While vendors may have focused on complete solutions, many people

were focusing on the benefits of Web-enablement of internal
information and systems through intranets - BusinessWeek reported on
the early adopters:

The Web, it turns out, is an inexpensive yet powerful alternative to other

forms of internal communications, including conventional computer
setups. One of an intranet's most obvious virtues is its ability to slash
the need for paper. Because Web browsers run on any type of computer,
the same electronic information can be viewed by any employee. That
means all sorts of documents--internal phone books, procedure
manuals, training materials, requisition forms--can be converted to
electronic form on the Web and constantly updated for almost nothing.

But intranets can do something far more important. By presenting

information in the same way to every computer, they can do what
computer and software makers have frequently promised but never
actually delivered: pull all the computers, software, and databases that
dot the corporate landscape into a single system that enables employees
find information wherever it resides.

The breadth of possible use cases and skills required for a successful
intranet project was actually recognised early on - David Strom writing
in Forbes advised:

If you are about to begin your first Intranet project, you need to gather
together people of diverse skills: computer geeks, artists, diplomats, and
negotiators. It seems like a motley crew, but you'll need these diverse
talents, along with some careful choices in hardware and software, if
you will be successful.

Before you get started collecting your renaissance crew together, you
should first narrow your focus and pick your first project carefully.
Intranets can cover the enterprise or focus on particular workgroups,
and run the gamut from publishing applications to more traditional
groupware-style discussion tracking. They can cover inward-looking
applications of various Internet technologies such as the worldwide
web, email and Usenet news groups, and run on a wide variety of
operating systems and servers. And you'll need both technical and
artistic help to handle the myriad of details.

Web content has always been important to intranets and information

distribution (and authorship) was the raison d'être for the World Wide
Web, but intranets were never just about content alone (as is the
Internet).

Aren't intranets different today?

As intranet networks matured, the job of managing and maintaining the

different layers of hardware and software became more and more
specialised. At some point the concept of an intranet became
synonymous with Web content, rather than Netscape's "full service
intranet".

Another reason for the focus on the Web content was the issue of 'Wild
West Intranets'. One of the early benefits of the World Wide Web was
the relative ease of setting up a Web server, which users could access
through a free cross-platform Web browser. But intranets quickly
became victims of their own success. As early as 1998, Gartner, Inc.
wrote a paper that started to warn:

"Is Your Intranet the Wild West?"

In 2005, eimagazine explained the underlying problem this way:

"Information wielding content owners strutted about posting whatever

they felt was relevant, and then leaving their wares unattended to gather
up dust. Hapless users who stumbled upon this content were not quite
sure what to make of it. Was the information still applicable or was it
left there months ago?"

On the Internet, sites like 'David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide
Web', which became Yahoo!, and later Google, appeared to help users
deal with the problem. But on intranets, managers spent the following
decade trying to use a combination of governance and centralised
managed tools such as Web content management systems (WCMS),
portals and enterprise search to tame the intranet. In many organisation,
this battle with Web content continues to this day.

However, its interesting to note that in Chris McGrath's 2011 definition

of an intranet he explains that James Robertson updated his definition
on an intranet in 2008 to include 'collaboration' as he observed at that
time:

"intranets started showing serious evolution from static websites

towards the place where collaborative work gets done."

In fact, when we look back at the history of intranets, it would appear

they have instead gone full circle.

What does social, mobile and cloud mean for intranets?

While the intranet conversation has been dominated by the issue of

management and control, an alternative conversation was also taking
place. Some called it knowledge management, but in 2002 Clay Shirky -
more correctly - defined it as 'social software'. A year later, he explained
this term in a presentation:

"My definition is fairly simple: It's software that supports group

interaction. I also want to emphasize, although that's a fairly simple
definition, how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of
communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-
to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.

We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato
BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread
availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning
how to make these kinds of things."

4 years later, Andrew McAfee placed social software into an intranet

context when he described his concept for Enterprise 2.0 in an MIT
Sloan Management Review article. He described it as a way for social
media tools to:
"make a corporate intranet into a constantly changing structure built by
distributed, autonomous peers".

The first wiki was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, but its not
surprising that it was many years until Web-based intranets started to
adopt these kinds of applications.

On the 10th March, 2000, the dot com bubble reached its peak. But
rather than this being the end of the Internet, this was just the first wave
of change - there was more to come, with a second wave of growth built
on a mix of social media, cloud and mobile computing:

 Amazon diversified from simply being an e-commerce site to

providing cloud server infrastructure with the launch of Amazon
Web Services in 2002.

 Facebook was launched at in 2004, attracting its first 1,200 users

in the first 24 hours of its existence.

 In 2007, Apple "Reinvents the Phone with iPhone".

Ultimately the influence of this Internet technology innovation on

intranets has been unavoidable - for example, Yammer was launched in
2008, with the simple question:

"What are you working on?"

Yammer successfully launched an enterprise micro-blog solution that

utilised all three concepts - it was hosted online, provided employees
with a private social network (like Facebook) and was fully accessible
by mobile devices. Yammer was acquired this year by Microsoft, who
are building out a similar strategy with SharePoint itself.

Thinking about the excitement that the launch of Mosaic created in

1993, 20 years later social software tools like Yammer have the same
aura of excitement and change. Some people think of this as
unnecessary hype; personally I'm glad that Mosaic helped to make the
World Wide Web popular as my iPhone would be wasted as an interface
to a Gopher server.
What is more reasonable is to fear a return to the wild west intranet era,
because this latest wave of technologies exhibit many similar features to
the early days of intranet. The difference today is that users don't even
need to know how to setup a Web server - they can simply subscribe to
service or sign up online with a credit card. As a result, intranet
governance is still important, but new approaches may be required as
will new skills because of new technologies. In particular, control
through centralisation is unlikely to work (or will be very expensive)
because these tools are by their nature distributed.

When we look back at the history of intranets, until the emergence of

social software very little that was new was written about the
management of intranets since they first appeared in the late 1990s. All
the advice and techniques used today to manage Web content in an
intranet were developed at the same time as intranets emerged. One of
the earliest intranet case studies was actually written by Jakob Nielsen
and Darrel Sano in 1994 about their approach to designing Sun
Microsystems' intranet - and yes, one of the methods was card sorting!

This page - based on the URL, from circa September 1996- records the
experiences of companies implementing intranets at that time - the
problems they solve with an intranet and the issues they face are earily
familiar too. One writes:

"It is currently difficult for off-site employees to get access from our
"closed system"

And another:

"Like external Internet pages, finding information isn't always quick.

Many people stop by my office for a faster answer."

(there are more views from October 1996 too)

So at the risk of reinventing the wheel, what should we do to deal with

the emergence of social, mobile and cloud computing? History would
suggest that a static definition of what is an intranet (and therefore, what
is in and what is out) does not actually reflect the ever change landscape
of intranets. Renaming intranets with terms such as 'Enterprise 2.0',
'Social Intranets' or the 'Digital Workplace' may help to define intranets
at a point in time to generate discussion, but ultimately this also causes
confusion (and can lead to accusations of hype).

Writing more recently, David Strom asks "What ever happened to

Intranets?":

Back in the mid-1990s when the Web was young, we had corporate
Intranets popping up all over the place. These were typically internal
projects that were used to disseminate information to employees about
projects, products, and customers. They were quick and dirty efforts that
often involved off-the-shelf parts and little (if any) programming. The
idea was to produce a corporate Web portal that was just for internal
use, to enable staff to share documents, best practices, customer
information and the like.

But they are mostly historical artefacts now. What happened? … the
tool sets got better. Many companies migrated their Intranets to Wikis
or WordPress when it became clear that these products were easier to
maintain and use. And then a whole class of products now called
enterprise social networks arrived which have ready-made discussion
groups, microblogs, news streams, and social media.

The intranet is dead, long live the intranet.

What next?

I actually don't think there is an easy answer to this problem. The future
of intranets has always been written on the Web - if you want to know
where intranets are heading, just need to look there. But the constant
challenge is to apply Web tools effectively inside organisations.

If we are to deal with the challenge we do need to shift away from the
idea that intranets are about Web content management. We actually
need a more flexible mindset, because its not just about social either:

 The focus of what constitutes an intranet is dynamic - it expands

and contracts based on the technologies being deployed and
level of specialisation needed to manage those tools at a
particular point in time.
  Intranet governance is really an integration process to make new
and expanding intranet tools manageable and beneficial to the
organisation (but not necessarily control).

 The role of the intranet manager is in part to be a governance

leader, but also to act as a safety net for any aspect of the
intranet that a specialist role or function fails to address.

Ultimately, intranets are what we make of them.