Integrating Existing Systems

Whether or not an intranet already exists in an organization, chances are there are already one or more networked digital information systems of some sort being used. There are a number of different systems and technologies that are often used in these types of situations. Though the full details of integrating such systems go beyond the scope of this book, you should be aware that such options exist.

E-Mail Servers

Microsoft's Exchange Server (http://www.microsoft.com/exchange) and IBM's Lotus Domino (http://www.lotus.com) are very popular applications for intranet use. Both not only manage e-mail communications, but also contacts, calendars, and scheduling tools. They can contain a great deal of very interesting information about the organization that uses it, the people that work with it, and their business contacts. Customizing these systems can provide a good starting point for the intranet, since they already provide a communications platform for a network.

SAP

SAP (http://www.sap.com), and a number of comparable systems such as Clarify, are basically SQL-compliant databases around which extensive software interfaces have been created for a variety of business purposes. On the intranet we will probably want to replace the proprietary interface with an HTML form or access certain data directly from within an application. In such cases these systems can best be viewed as complicated SQL-compliant databases. Since they are based on SQL, they can be accessed by a variety of means, dependent on platform, such as Microsoft's ActiveX Database Objects (ADO) or a similar interface.

Although they may run on a 'regular' SQL database, software systems such as these are very complex and very often you will need to consult a specialist to get the data you require. It is important to get this right, you can't just do test runs on an integrated administrative system without running the risk of compromising its data, with potential catastrophic consequences.

Databases and Spreadsheets

In business today a surprising number of administrative tasks are still done in Microsoft Access and even more in a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel. Although these programs are not necessarily made for the task, the fact is that they are used a great deal. This is largely because many people have them installed already; Excel in particular, is often used because it is so easy to learn. The result is that most intranets will, sooner or later, need to connect and get some data from an Access database or an Excel sheet that can be found somewhere on the company network. And if that's not enough of a challenge, there are a host of other database systems that are commonly used in businesses, such as MS SQL Server, Oracle DBS, Progress, and more. If you are using a Microsoft platform then ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) and ADO (ActiveX Database Objects) are ideal for providing this sort of connectivity, but most web scripting languages offer methods for access of this kind.

XML

When considering integrating applications with the intranet it is well worth thinking about XML. Because it works so well as a structured data language XML is a great intermediate stage of transferring data between two systems, or in situations where security issues prevent direct access to a data source. When XML is used in this way it is much like a more structured version of the 'text-dump' we would have used for such a problem in the past.

For more information on XML see Practical XML for the Web, glasshaus author team, glasshaus, ISBN 1-904151-08-6.