Friday, January 19, 2007

Intranet A Borrowed Explanation

While searching on the net, I found a nice site on Intranets. What was nice about this site was its outlook on the Intranet scenario. I would like to quote the definition as interpreted by this site.

Intranets are a compelling new way of looking at communication and information flow within your organization. As a communication infrastructure, an intranet is based on the communication standards of the Internet which include the content standards of the World Wide Web (WWW), e-mail, file transfer protocol (ftp), and news services. The tools used to create an intranet are, for the most part, the same as those used for Internet and Web applications. Access to information published on an intranet is restricted to users within a designated intranet group, usually accomplished through the use of local area networks (LANs) protected by firewalls (security devices that regulate traffic between an organization's intranet and the outside world).

Intranets can cover the enterprise or focus on particular workgroups, and they run the gamut from publishing applications to more traditional groupware-style discussion tracking. More recently, technology has begun to make restricted access feasible in shared environments. These extended intranets offer the ability to cost-effectively integrate the virtual enterprise--the company, its suppliers, distributors, and customers--through intranets that extend beyond the corporate walls.

Intranets springing up today generally consist of internal corporate Web servers made available to employees across the LAN or through private dial-up access. Through links to corporate databases, file servers, and document repositories, Web servers bring diverse kinds of information to users through a single front end--the familiar Web browser. This allows users to view information presented as text, graphics, sound, video and animation, which adds to the potential for rapid data assimilation. Employees use their Web browsers to access corporate Web pages that have links to corporate documents and data written in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Increasingly, new products are appearing to give intranets group discussion and other groupware features.

Unlike the Internet, where you quickly encounter the barrier of 28.8K modems, corporate LANs have a bandwidth 300 to 700 times greater on average than the typical consumer modem. That means not only that text and graphics can move faster through the pipeline, but that it is easier to add multimedia content types like sound, video, Java applets, and portable document files.

This was just to make you familiar with the concepts of an Intranet.



http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/intranets/39156