Differences between Intranet and Internet Development


There are some differences in working on intranet projects when compared to Internet projects. If you've never worked on an intranet before, chances are you'll finally get to use some of the more complex options of your server software. Where a lot of web sites tend to be run on shared ISP servers, intranets, by definition, are in the hands of the organization that uses it.

This doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want, intranet system administrators need to take care not to allow developers to create resource or security problems, but chances are that it will probably be a lot easier to convince your own company systems administrator to let you install some custom software than it will be to convince your ISP. Time to get out all your old books and look up the chapters you never got a chance to use before.

Known User Base

Unlike the Internet, on intranets you'll probably have a pretty good idea of what browsers and operating systems most of your users will be using. This allows for some freedom that is often missing in an Internet project. Coding for multiple browsers becomes less of a guessing game. For example, if you are using Internet Explorer then it is much easier to arrange the availability of customized ActiveX Components, whether you make them available over the network or go around and install them by hand. We'll cover the issue of browser base in more detail in Chapter 4.

"Unlike the Internet, on intranets you'll probably have a pretty good idea of what browsers and operating systems most of your users will be using"

The user base has another side; for instance, mobile and handheld devices of all sorts are becoming increasingly common and are bound to become an important part of the business-IT world in the near future. Where it can be quite a painstaking process to build a WAP-site that will work in (or adapt to) every available WAP-enabled telephone, adapting a few key HTML interfaces to a specific mobile device is not that much of a project. The intranet gives you the possibility to work out these kinds of options to any extent you can come up with.

Another advantage of a knowing who your users are is that you can have a greater ability to solicit and make use of feedback. This is invaluable in the planning stage, as you will be able to accurately identify the needs of the users. It also allows you to quickly spot potential problems by testing the intranet with genuine users. Once the intranet is available knowing your users allows for a constant cycle of improvement, which is much less of a guessing game than in an Internet situation.

Type of Content

The type of content that makes up an intranet can be very different than on a web site. Whereas web sites generally contain general information available to the general public, intranets tend to concentrate on very specific data that is often part of the actual business process of an organization. You wouldn't, for example, want to publish the addresses and phone numbers of all the users of a web site, but creating a company-wide address/phonebook on the intranet is a popular and often one of the first applications created. Where a web site might contain a calendar with some public events, an intranet could make the schedules of all its employees available on the intranet (providing suitable security of course). The availability of this kind of operational data is what can make working on intranet projects such an exiting task.

Another advantage of intranets is that they often run between a hundred and a thousand times faster than most Internet users' web access, so it is much more feasible to use rich graphics and even multimedia and other advanced content on intranet pages. Not that you should just use such facilities because they are available, but certainly features like intranet-based training and induction information can benefit from rich media content.

Typically the amount of content also differs. Your organization may only have a cursory web presence of a few pages, but because of its position as a corporate resource and communications platform an intranet may contain thousands of documents split over departments and locations. This makes organizing the data efficiently much more difficult, and brings issues like usability and information architecture to the fore.

Privacy and Security

Privacy has been a hot issue on the Internet from the beginning and will continue to be in the future, and is just as vital on the intranet. Because organizations generally keep a lot of information on their employees there is a lot of data that needs to be secure. The more interesting the data, and the more applications that are created to use the data, the more privacy becomes an issue.

Many employees will applaud a better system to handle their administrative data efficiently, but this will evaporate quickly if that data is not kept from prying eyes. Giving the wrong people, even within an organization, access to the personal data of an organization's members can have serious legal and staff morale consequences.

Security is related to privacy and is a major concern in intranet development because of the kind of data available within a company on employees and about the company itself. Not only is there a legal requirement to secure data about people in the organization, but leaking out strategically important business information to other companies is a scenario many businesses fear.

An insecure network not only poses the risk of data becoming public or misused, it also creates the possibility of losing important company data to successful attempts by hackers to create havoc on your network. It's essential to track anyone who does get in. For this reason, many companies have opted to keep their internal network completely separate from the Internet or devise creative firewall constructions.

Unfortunately security is a favorite argument for people opposed to Internet-based IT projects in general and intranets specifically. Security is obviously a very important issue, but deciding against development for fear of the security issue is sort of like deciding never trying to do anything for fear that someday one thing will go wrong. While security is an issue for intranets, you should keep in mind that it is much easier to control than on the Internet. The closed nature of the intranet makes it much easier to track users and control their access. We'll talk more about security in Chapter 10.




Practical Intranet Development
Practical Intranet Development
ISBN: 190415123X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 124

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