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FAQ

In collaboration with our associates, Relentless Research is now offering intranet design services. By leveraging our management consulting capabilities and experience, our team can provide uniquely designed internal information systems which exploit Internet technologies and flow directly out of our management evaluation of your operations.

Check out the META Group's June 1997 Intranet ROI Study

Intranet FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

1. What is an "intranet"?
   
2. What are the advantages of an intranet compared to the LAN or client/server model?
   
3. What are the limitations of intranets?
   
4. What is so special about tying intranets to Relentless Research's management consulting activities?
   
5. Okay, what's involved? How can we proceed?
   

  What is an "intranet"?

Simply stated, an intranet can serve as your own private Internet. Using proven key Internet technologies, your users can communicate and function in a World-Wide-Web-like environment that is secure, controllable and predictable. It provides an inexpensive vehicle for mobilizing your enterprise's computing and communications infrastructure, and exploits open technology standards. In the intranet scenario, your users interact with your organization's systems and resources represented by hypertext Web pages. The users view and interact with these pages via Web browsers installed on their desktops, just as they would on the "real" Internet.

Visit a sample fictitious intranet.

  What are the advantages of an intranet compared to a LAN or client/server paradigm?

Intranets may be the most affordable and practical means yet devised to approach the idealized state of a paperless office.

Intranets can co-exist with your present networks and client/server systems. In fact, it is quite likely that your existing systems already provide much, if not all, of the tools and resources that are needed to implement an intranet. If you have a LAN (local area network), an intranet can probably run directly on it and provide a good "front-end" to it. Likewise, your existing client/server applications won't be displaced by the intranet, but the intranet will provide a way to better weave it into your computing infrastructure in a way that is quite user-friendly and requires little training for your users.

Intranets tend to be inexpensive, especially compared to full-blown client-server systems. All that may be required on the client side is for each user to have a common Web browser (often available free of charge by some software publishers) installed on his/her workstation and the appropriate protocols for both server and desktop stations. In many cases, you may not even require a Web server. The smallest of businesses can participate and realize solid benefits from this technology.

Intranets are an easy learn for your users, especially if they have already had experience with using common Internet tools. Furthermore, non-technical users can have an important role in maintaining and growing your intranet without having to learn much more than their present productivity apps. A word processing document can be "published" in intranet (or Internet Web) ready form by merely printing a conventional document to an HTML-formatted file rather than to printer output, for example. Another most important feature of intranets is that they lend themselves to presenting help info and documentation, always available with a few mouse-clicks, easily customized to suit special and individual needs.

Intranets are readily scalable. Start out with a small pilot project and easily grow to whatever scale you might want. Grow at your own pace. This also means that intranet technology can absolutely make sense for a tiny office of two or three PCs on a simple peer network as well as for the largest of enterprises.

Intranets share one of the Internet's most important characteristics -- they are cross-platform. If you have a mixed environment now, you can easily get all your client desktops, from DOS PCs to Macs to Windows3.1/95/NT to UNIX workstations, to participate in the experience. If you plan to change or diversify your operating system scenario in the future, your intranet investment can largely and easily be transported to the new environment.

Intranets by definition deal with captive audiences. This means that you can deploy whatever special variations of Internet technology that you want -- such as video, multimedia, unique browser plugins -- without the worries of bandwidth, browser incompatibilities, lack of support for specialized features at the client end, security concerns, etc. that might accompany a public, external Internet presence. You don't have to guess about the capabilities or configurations of visitors to your Web site -- you are in a position to dictate terms with your intranet, rather than having to cater to the lowest common denominator or risk partial loss of your intended audience.

Intranets are poised to take advantage of the ever-increasing rate of progress in this industry. Internet technology is largely based on open standards. These standards are the foundation upon which the entire industry is driving into a true software development and communications revolution.

  What are the disadvantages or weaknesses of intranets?

Intranets may not be an effective substitute for sophisticated database operations such as high-volume online transaction processing. Nor is an intranet apt to cause you to toss out your office suites of "productivity applications" -- browsers don't generally come with embedded word processors (yet). Marrying databases and interactive applications to Internet (and intranet) technology is in its infancy. When intranets first entered mainstream thinking, they were mainly seen as ways of publishing information (and they do excel at this), but more recent trends and developments are making intranets more feasible as a two-way street, in which the user interacts directly with the underlying systems without having to possess the expert knowledge that was once required.

Some situations will require dedicated Web servers, particularly if they require logging, monitoring, scripting or processes which must run only on the server side. Depending on specific requirements, even this may not be an onerous obstacle -- a lowly Windows 95 machine, for example, can often be equipped with low-cost server software to run a smaller, non-mission-critical intranet. Watch for the emerging trend for server features to be built directly into client software -- expect to see what in effect will become a "Web server on every desktop". Note, for example, Microsoft's plans for its next generation of Windows 9x and its Office suite, which will employ an operating system-based browser interface for virtually everything, and permit all applications to output their files as Web-ready HTML documents.

You can be assured that all the serious players in the industry are working at fever pitch on such issues; solutions in these areas are emerging almost daily. Many such solutions already exist, particularly for the small business or organization that uses off-the-shelf software in a single-server network (such as Novell Netware, Windows NT, Windows for Work Groups, or Windows 95) supporting Windows clients. Relentless Research is engaged in closely following such developments as a primary part of its mission. And if you haven't seen evidence of the industry's wholesale jump onto the intranet/Internet bandwagon, you've probably been vacationing on another planet for the past few months.

  What is so special about tying intranets to management consulting activities?

Over the years, we have seen in our management consulting work that organizations fail or stumble again and again due to poor communication about goals and expectations, disorganized and inefficient access to resources, processes that are irrelevant to strategic goals, failure to exploit information assets, and similar information management problems. By looking at our history of recommendations to clients, we can see that an appropriate intranet implementation would almost always have been an ideal vehicle for establishing an environment to facilitate communication and action around well-formed business goals, and for implementing our specific recommendations. Of course, the critical mass for Internet technology as we are now experiencing it is a quite recent phenomenon (even though the core technologies -- TCP/IP, HTML, etc. -- involved are mostly well-established and proven pieces of the puzzle), so we did not always have available the luxury of such a practical and flexible solution.

You might also ask whether the many networking consultants and backyard programmers who are leaping aboard the intranet (buzzword-of-the-month) bandwagon possess the management consulting depth and background that Relentless and its associates possess!

  Okay, what's involved? How can we proceed?

Because intranets afford such a splendid opportunity to rethink your organization's strategies and operations, we prefer that we first undertake a management review or at least survey of your enterprise before designing an intranet solution. Compared to traditional "needs analyses" and the like and the typically-attendant long development times for custom solutions, the risk is low because of the nature and particularly the scalability of the technology involved.

Of course, if your perceptions of need are modest or if you want to deploy a small-scale demonstration project, we can work with you without the benefit of a formal management review. The very nature of intranet technology is that you can have it your way.