Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Why intranet

The SmartCorp. began their intranet development as an experiment. They were looking for a way to better disseminate information to employees and better automate customer service processes. Rather than using proprietary software to deliver this end they decided to use this project as a testing ground for the creation of an intranet. The SmartCorp. had heard of Internet technology being used internally by other companies and felt it could offer them a cost-effective solution.

The intranet was developed internally. SmartCorp. set up a web server behind their firewall to host the intranet. This web server runs Windows NT, OReilly's Web Site server software, and the Cold Fusion database development tool. One person was responsible for publishing content, administering the server and educating users. The lack of knowledge of HTML, CGI and web browsers was an early obstacle to development.