Related Web Works

[Image]

[Image] [Image]

[net / features]

Ê [11 Lessons From Intranet Webmasters] Ê Ê [Intranet Webmasters[Special Intranet Report By Dana Blankenhorn] these internal sites. Here are their favorite tips, tricks, and principles.] Ê Ê

Ê [T] he Internet Revolution of 1995 has become Ê the Intranet Revolution of 1996. Just as Ê Internet Webmasters learned hard lessons Ê based on rapid change and bottom-line Ê demands, savvy intranet managers are learning lessons you can benefit from now. We interviewed 34 Webmasters to discover the most important lessons they learned. Here are the 11 we considered to be the best of the bunch:

1. The Intranet Is Electronic Commerce This may be the most important lesson of all, says Aron Dutta, a principal at New York-based consultancy Booz, Allen & Hamilton. Dutta has spent the past two years putting together the company's intranet.

[Image]The intranet, he says, is not a corporate internet behind a firewall, but a way of doing business. "The intranet allows you to connect people inside your corporation as well as people you deal with," Dutta says. Participants using browsers inside and outside the company share a common interface and communications environment.

[Image]Electronic commerce, which has been defined as the buying and selling of goods and services online, now is being redefined by people like Dutta to mean all of a company's business processes that can take place online, done in a secure way.

2. The Internet Leads to the Intranet Lt. Gary McDougall, who runs the University of Southern California's Department of Public Safety's intranet, learned this lesson. Soon after he put the department's Web site online early this year, McDougall was asked to convert his department's 50-node internal network to TCP/IP and HTML. The Web site now carries officers' e-mail addresses, information on crime prevention, and other files. Netscape has become the main way officers access and input campus crime data.

[Image]Deborah Howard, a partner at 2 Cow Herd, a Venice, Calif., Internet service provider, has received many calls to build intranets from the same customers who earlier called about Web sites. "Once people see how the Internet works, they want it within their companies," she says­a natural evolution.

[Image]Marc Trimuschat, WebForce Server marketing manager at Silicon Graphics Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., calls intranets the third step in a natural evolution. It starts with building a Web site and continues by enabling access to the site for insiders via TCP/IP. Once all the insiders have a browser and connectivity, the intranet emerges, usually as pages are connected to company databases.

3. The Intranet Can Actually Reduce Paperwork The paperless office has long been an unrealized dream, but the intranet partially achieves it. Todd Martini, president of Glen Cove Computing Inc., in Vallejo, Calif., tells his clients to begin building intranets by implementing applications that eliminate paperwork and thus can provide a fast return on investments.

[Image]Many of these intranets, Martini says, are built department by department, like the help-desk application he installed at Wells Fargo Corp.. The bank has a database of trouble tickets, which are requests for computer support on the company's networks. Putting that data on a Web site eliminated paper and saved money. A first application doesn't have to be complicated, Martini notes. Once they prove their mettle, however, efforts to bring more complex types of data to the intranet can become more difficult.

4. One Simple Interface Is Best Bob Walker, CIO at Hewlett-Packard Co., in Palo Alto, Calif., ran the world's biggest intranet before the Web was even born. "We made the conversion to TCP/IP in 1989," running the company's entire network on Internet standards. But the character-based interfaces of that day were "really kludgy," he admits.

[Image]HP really didn't gain the full benefits of its intranet until browsers like Netscape gave all its 90,000 desktop users a universal interface for getting data from the company's 4,000 servers. It's a "Swiss Army Knife" for the HP network, he says, able "to do anything you want done."

[Image]For example, HP has cut the costs of PC maintenance by putting configuration data on servers, Walker notes. All of HP's product databases can be instantly accessed from any desktop. Revenues have doubled in the past two years, to $31.5 billion, with just 10 percent more employees. Intranets also have become a big business for HP, which has an alliance with Netscape to build intranet applications.

[Image]The universal interface of the Web browser, however, needs the universal connectivity of TCP/IP to be effective, Walker says. Ray Laracuenta, senior research analyst for Gartner Group Inc., in Stamford, Conn., agrees. "Intranet technology is a least common denominator and can deliver significant synergies," he says.

5. Demand Adherence to Standards TCP/IP and HTML aren't the only important intranet standards, says Curtis Franklin, director of Client/Server Labs, in Atlanta. And mere adherence to standards doesn't guarantee a successful intranet.

[Image]Franklin's company creates benchmark programs, which can show network managers how software is affecting their networks. Benchmarks, usually sold only to vendors, are becoming important on new intranets because many intranet applications are early versions and performance varies widely.

[Image]"I have been shocked at how poorly the standards that are purported to be there actually work," Franklin says. "If you're trying to get an HTML page to a database via Open Database Connectivity, it's a rough and rocky road," he says. If translation between HTML and the database is slow, network performance can slow to a crawl.

[Image]Leslie Norins, publisher of the Intranet Success Stories newsletter, says many managers are examining intranet spending closely and asking what they're getting out of it. If products claiming to work under standards don't work, intranet development can grind to a halt.

[Image]In some quarters, the philosophy "Build it and they will come" exists, Norins says. "Our view is that success can only be measured by usefulness and participation," he adds.

[Image]The intranet operator also has to wear a marketing hat, something many network managers find hard to fathom. "It's been supplicants coming to beg help­they haven't had to sell their wares," Norins says.

6. Plan for Increased Traffic Gerry Crook, director of computer service and administrative computing at the Augusta Technical Institute, in Augusta, Ga., says the smartest thing he's done on his campuswide intranet was to upgrade his network capacity before putting in popular Web-based applications (see "Bandwidth in Augusta," next page). Now, teachers can create Web-based multimedia courseware, students can learn about classes through on-campus kiosks, and the network runs at only 4 percent of capacity. Crook says there's no network downtime.

[Image]The popularity of intranet applications is quickly turning yesterday's Webmasters into today's network managers, says Jim Zepp, marketing manager for the Internet Solutions Program at HP. "It's not just a matter of technology. There's a lot of planning and process issues," he says, like managing the company's IP addresses and keeping enough bandwidth on each desktop so workers can use the intranet without thinking about it.

[Image]Fritz Mueller, Chameleon line product manager at NetManage Inc., in Cupertino, Calif., explains what can happen as intranets grow. "I can try and run a videoconference, but there's nothing stopping the person below me from doing a giant file transfer at the same moment," he says. "That stomps on my bandwidth, and I can't figure out who's doing the stomping." In July, NetManage introduced software to deal with that contention, but if there's enough bandwidth to begin with, Crook says, that software is not necessary.

Turn to page 2 (of 2)...

[index]

------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Image]