What is an Intranet
Intranets are private corporate information and collaboration systems that use Internet software and standards.
Why an Intranet
The Intranet can increase market share, profitability, and efficiency.
- An ideal platform for continuously updated internal information publishing.
- Powerful, inexpensive communications alternative that can provide information anywhere at anytime.
- Intranet technology can be used across wide area networks.
- Web server software inter-operates well.
- Web servers do not need large capital expenditures in hardware as other groupware products.
- Web browsers are available for any platform, and there is no interplatform compatibility problems.
How can an Intranet help your company
Interoperability and flexibility allows Intranets and the Internet to send information to all employees directly to e-mail accounts, fax machines, remote printers, or via video conferencing thus boosting productivity. Since employees use their familiar browsing tools your company can avoid the training and support that come with groupware client programs. Unlike groupware systems that can be cumbersome to install and administer, Intranets can be relatively simple and inexpensive to administer.
The following are some of the information that an Intranet and the Internet can make available for internal and or external use eliminating printing, reprinting, and out-of-date information. This brings large benefits to geographically dispersed groups.
- Procedures Manuals
- Company Practices
- Company phone book
- Catalog and Inventory lists (Limited intrantet access to customers)
- Employee benefits information (Health-care benefits)
- Bulletin boards
- Job Postings
- In-house newsletters or publications (Apply for vacation time)
- Memoranda
- USNET News
- Training
- Presentations
- Order Processing
- Inventory Control (Know inventory levels at all geographically dispersed locations)
- Workgroup Collaboration (Workers can collaborate from different cities and greatly reduce time to market. Workers can also collaborate from different cities and solve problems at one site that have been solved at another
- Expense Report
- Sales Force Automation ( Offsite employees conducting sales, marketing, or anything in general can access all the companies information remotely easily and in a cost effective way)
- Help-desk and technical support
- Company suppliers information (What each supplier is quoting at each specific location)
- Access search and sort database records dynamically by converting databases to HTML on the fly, in SQL or other formats.
- Sort through thousands of documents and quickly retrieve the information you need with the proper search engine.
- Video Conferencing
Putting such applications on an Intranet can serve a large group of users at a substantially low cost.
