Three Sources of Information At least three sources of content quickly emerge on enterprise Intranets: formal, project/group, and informal.

The formal information is the officially sanctioned and commissioned information of the enterprise. It usually has been reviewed for accuracy, currency, confidentiality, liability and commitment. This is the information with which the formal management infrastructure is most concerned. Project/group information is intended for use within a specific group. It may be used to communicate and share ideas, coordinate activities or manage the development and approval of content that eventually will become formal. Project/Group information generally is not listed in the enterprise-wide directories and may be protected by passwords or other restrictions if general access might create problems. Informal information begins to appear on the Intranet when authors and users discover how easy it is to publish within the existing infrastructure. Informal information is not necessarily the same thing as personal home pages. A personal folder or directory on an Intranet server can serve as a repository for white papers, notes and concepts that may be shared with others in the enterprise to further common interests, for the solicitation of comments or for some other reason. Instead of making copies, the URL can be given to the interested parties, and the latest version can be read and tracked as it changes. This type of informal information can become a powerful stimulus for the collaborative development of new concepts and ideas.

Two Types of Pages There are two basic types of pages: content pages and broker pages. Content pages contain the information of value required by a user. Broker pages help users find the content pages appropriate for their current requirements. Content pages can take many forms. They may be static pages, like the ones you are reading here, or they may be active pages where the page content is generated "on the fly" from a database or other repository of information. Content pages generally are owned by an individual. Over time expect the "form and sense" of content pages to change as more experience is gained in the areas of non-linear documents (hyperlinking), multimedia, modular content and integration of content and logic using applets. Broker pages also come in more than one form, but all have the same function, to help users find relevant information. Good broker pages serve an explicitly defined audience or function. Many of the pages with which we already are familiar are broker pages. A hyperlink broker page contains links to other pages, in context. It also may have a short description of the content to which it is pointing to help the user evaluate the possibilities. On the other hand, a search oriented broker page is not restricted to the author's scope, but it also does not provide the same level of context to help the user formulate the appropriate question.

THE INTRANET INFRASTRUCTURE Management Roles The Intranet Infrastructure relies on four distinct roles for managing the formal content: the Web Administrator, publishers, editors and authors. The Web Administrator is responsible for facilitating cooperative opportunities among the various organizations in the enterprise and administering the enterprise content management infrastructure. By contrast, the Webmaster is responsible for the technical infrastructure. The same person may serve in both roles, but to do so requires that she have both of the distinctly different skill sets and enough time to carry out both sets of responsibilities. The Web Administrator chairs the Enterprise Web Council. Publishers determine what kinds of formal information will be created and maintained by their organization. They represent their organization on the Enterprise Web Council and may create and chair an Editorial Board within their own organization. The publishers own the processes and policies that both the enterprise and their organization require officially sanctioned information to follow. In larger organizations, they may delegate the monitoring and implementation to editors, but the responsibility remains with the publisher. Editors are found in organizations that have multiple product lines or service areas. For example, Human Resources might have editors for Benefits, Compensation, Equal Opportunity and Staffing. In a line of business, the editor often is the primary marketing person for each product line. The editor determines what official information will be created for specific activities and manages the information creation and update process, including the formal review cycles. Authors create the content.

What Is a Firewall? A firewall is a secure and trusted machine that sits between a private network and a public network. The firewall machine is configured with a set of rules that determine which network traffic will be allowed to pass and which will be blocked or refused.

What is a proxy server? A proxy server, also known as a "proxy" or "application level gateway", is a computer that acts as a gateway between a local network (e.g., all the computers at one company or in one building) and a larger-scale network such as the Internet. Proxy servers provide increased performance and security. In some cases, they monitor employees' use of outside resources.

In computer networks, a proxy server is a server (a computer system or an application program) that services the requests of its clients by forwarding requests to other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource, available from a different server. The proxy server provides the resource by connecting to the specified server and requesting the service on behalf of the client. A proxy server may optionally alter the client's request or the server's response, and sometimes it may serve the request without contacting the specified server. In this case, it would 'cache' the first request to the remote server, so it could save the information for later, and make everything as fast as possible. A caching proxy server accelerates service requests by retrieving content saved from a previous request made by the same client or even other clients. Caching proxies keep local copies of frequently requested resources, allowing large organizations to significantly reduce their upstream bandwidth usage and cost, while significantly increasing performance. Most ISPs and large businesses have a caching proxy. Web proxy A proxy that focuses on WWW traffic is called a "web proxy". The most common use of a web proxy is to serve as a web cache. Most proxy programs (e.g. Squid) provide a means to deny access to certain URLs in a blacklist, thus providing content filtering. This is usually used in a corporate environment, though with the increasing use of Linux in small businesses and homes, this function is no longer confined to large corporations. Some web proxies reformat web pages for a specific purpose or audience (e.g., cell phones and PDAs). Anonymizing proxy server An anonymous proxy server (sometimes called a web proxy) generally attempts to anonymize web surfing. These can easily be overridden by site administrators, and thus rendered useless in some cases. There are different varieties of anonymizers. One of the more common variations is the open proxy. Because they are typically difficult to track, open proxies are especially useful to those seeking online anonymity, from political dissidents to computer criminals. Access control: Some proxy servers implement a logon requirement. In large organizations, authorized users must log on to gain access to the web. The organization can thereby track usage to individuals. Hostile proxy Proxies can also be installed in order to eavesdrop upon the dataflow between client machines and the web. All accessed pages, as well as all forms submitted, can be captured and analyzed by the proxy operator. For this reason, passwords to online services (such as webmail and banking) should always be exchanged over a cryptographically secured connection, such as SSL.

Intercepting proxy server An intercepting proxy (also known as a "transparent proxy") combines a proxy server with a gateway. Connections made by client browsers through the gateway are redirected through the proxy without client-side configuration (or often knowledge). Forced proxy The term "forced proxy" is ambiguous. It means both "intercepting proxy" (because it filters all traffic on the only available gateway to the Internet) and its exact opposite, "nonintercepting proxy" (because the user is forced to configure a proxy in order to access the Internet). Open proxy server Main article: Open proxy Because proxies might be used to abuse, system administrators have developed a number of ways to refuse service to open proxies. Many IRC networks automatically test client systems for known types of open proxy. Likewise, an email server may be configured to automatically test e-mail senders for open proxies. A reverse proxy is a proxy server that is installed in the neighborhood of one or more web servers. All traffic coming from the Internet and with a destination of one of the web servers goes through the proxy server. What is a firewall proxy server? Most modern firewalls distinguish between packet filtering and proxy server services. A firewall proxy server is an application that acts as an intermediary between two end systems. What different types of firewalls are there? Firewalls fall into four broad categories: o o o o Packet filters, Circuit level gateways, Application level gateways Stateful multilayer inspection firewalls.

Packet filtering firewalls work at the network level of the OSI model, or the IP layer of TCP/IP. They are usually part of a router. A router is a device that receives packets from one network and forwards them to another network. In a packet filtering firewall each packet is compared to a set of criteria before it is forwarded. Circuit level gateways work at the session layer of the OSI model, or the TCP layer of TCP/IP. They monitor TCP handshaking between packets to determine whether a requested session is legitimate. Information passed to remote computer through a circuit level gateway appears to have originated from the gateway.

Application level gateways, also called proxies, are similar to circuit-level gateways except that they are application specific. They can filter packets at the application layer of the OSI model. Incoming or outgoing packets cannot access services for which there is no proxy. Stateful Multilayer Inspection Firewalls combine the aspects of the other three types of firewalls. They filter packets at the network layer, determine whether session packets are legitimate and evaluate contents of packets at the application layer. They allow direct connection between client and host, alleviating the problem caused by the lack of transparency of application level gateways.