Typical Intranet Applications and Content

An intranet can contain many applications and a variety of types of content. Though some will be specific to your organization, there are a number that are consistently useful to place on an intranet.

In its most basic form an intranet could be a simple workgroup with just a few PCs or an international corporate network spanning several countries. It might include the simple sharing of information over a shared network drive or folder, or the distribution of software applications through public folders. There are a great many small companies with this kind of network. Often these networks are used minimally, largely because even the knowledge needed to make better use of them is simply not available within the organization. However, these applications can form the building blocks for your intranet.

News, Messages, and Knowledge

Like the Internet, e-mail, messaging, bulletin boards, and e-mail discussion groups and lists are often the first and most used elements on an internal network. E-mail offers an immediacy, saves time moving around, and allows the person being mailed to choose a time suitable to them to read and respond, causing fewer interruptions and greater efficiency.

Although e-mail can be a great benefit to an organization, it can cause several problems. Because it is so often the default way of sharing information between individuals, it can result in the same information constantly being sent round, rather than being pooled in one place. Because you have to know the correct person to e-mail to get information, it can lead to the information being lost to other members of an organization, who don't know who to contact. An intranet offers many opportunities for archiving this useful information in a more accessible way, creating a knowledge base for frequently asked questions, or a discussion forum so that all users can easily contact topic experts.

We'll talk more about news and messages, and how they can make the intranet a communications platform for your organization in Chapter 9.

Contact Information

Address books and lists of available company resources are an essential part of most intranets. In large organizations with separated departments we are no longer 'walking around' the organization; because of this it becomes harder to get in touch with the right people within an organization. Having a central place on the intranet to find resources, whether they exist in the form of people, information, or applications can ensure greater and more efficient use of the intranet resources. As organizations become larger, and it becomes more and more difficult to keep track of the activities of all its users, this becomes more and more important.

Human Resources

According to the latest ideas in business the most important point of competition and possible advantage of one company over its competitors is found in its human resources. Companies are investing more and more money in their employees in the form of training and education. All this can cost a lot in terms of company resources to maintain, resulting in increased interest in the development of internal HRM (Human Resource Management) systems for the organization and its employees. The intranet is an ideal place to disseminate this kind of information to employees.

Organization-Specific Applications

In any organization there is an area that can really benefit from automation in general and via the intranet specifically. Every organization has a number of processes that are specific to its day-today operations. Though there is good software available for a great variety of tasks, almost every organization has a number of processes that require software to be specifically written or customized. These specific applications give you a good chance of finding the 'killer app', the application that will be so useful that it makes the intranet a vital part of your organization's life. We'll talk much more about identifying which applications are needed on your company's intranet in future chapters.

Business-Critical Applications

As an intranet becomes a central resource and application platform for your organization, it is likely that you will be asked to integrate business-critical applications with the intranet. When business-critical applications are involved, some extra issues come into play. The first thing to think about is the reliability of the application. Business-critical applications need to be extensively tested, and safety procedures need to be in place for when the application does fail. One of the things that you'll probably notice is that the costs of hardware are often considerably higher for these types of application. Servers will need to have integrated backup systems, possibly RAID hard disks and special power supplies and even cooling to ensure minimal downtimes when problems occur.

Security is also a major issue. Not only do we now need to protect the data and its integrity as we would in any system, but for business-critical applications it is important that the system itself is secured against attacks, from both inside and outside the company. In large organizations with many employees this last issue should not be underestimated. Many security breaches are the result of problems within the organization.