Saturday, January 20, 2007

Managed by the same tools, attitudes, and procedures as VTAM networks

The Intranet should mimic the corporate SNA backbone in terms of purpose and procedures. The only difference is that different tools are required to manage the two networks. Many of these tools originate in the Unix community that spawned the Internet, and many are being created today out of a need for more corporate control and higher levels of service required for the Intranet.

Just because the Intranet uses the same protocols and languages of the Internet doesn't mean it has to follow the same rules of operation and chaotic anything-goes environment: indeed, what many corporations are beginning to realize is that out of this chaos comes some important design considerations for building very reliable Intranets.

One example would be the ability to assign maintenance chores for particular pieces of content to different corporate departments who develop and maintain the information. Other management issues include being able to provide a local cache of popular or u seful Web sites for better performance or to ease network congestion. Other issues include providing a very granular user-based access control and reporting of usage statistics help corporate Intranet developers to fine-tune their applications.

Forthcoming products from Attachmate, such as the Internet Access server and Internet Conferencing and Publishing systems, will include some of these management tools built-in as part of the product. Other vendors are working on additional enhancements to manage changes to content and automating scripting of frequently-used routines.



http://www.strom.com/pubwork/intranetp.html