Intranets


The technology behind the Internet can now be utilised to set up a dynamic method of managing and accessing a companyís shared data. Dermot Hogan explores Intranets




INTERNAL

AFFAIRS


Developments in the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) have opened up the world of online information to millions of individuals. Now,

the same technology that underlies the Internet can be applied on a smaller scale to a companyís local or wide area networks in the form of an ëinternal Internetí ñ Intranet for short. The potential for organisations to increase productivity is vast. Just think of the number of times youíve received a report an inch thick from your mainframe, when all you really wanted was a single number. Intranet technology could mean goodbye to all that.

Closed-circuit vision

The structure underpinning an Intranet is a ëWebíñ a term borrowed from the World Wide Web. The WWW is a huge collection of linked pages of text with embedded graphics. You move from page to page using a Web ëbrowserí, such as the Microsoft® Internet Explorer. Itís easy to think of the WWW as a single entity stored on one computer, however, thatís far from the truth. The WWW is composed of many Web servers each contributing anything from a few to thousands of pages.

This is where an Intranet comes in. Instead of using a Web server to send pages out to the WWW, you can use a browser and a Web server to direct and distribute information internally around your company. In effect, an Intranet works as a closed, smaller version of the WWW, but one that can still stretch across continents. So, with todayís low-cost telecommunication networks, a company can just as easily access its Paris-based Intranet from its sales office in Madrid as its manufacturing facility in Turin.

Intranets step by step

An Intranet has many components. First,

thereís the information carrier ñ the network itself. So you donít need anything special or mysterious to create an Intranet. The basic local area network ñ Ethernet, token-ring or fibre ñ will distribute Intranet information in exactly the same way that it allows you to share files or connect to your mainframe. And connecting up to wide-area communication channels wonít give you any problems either. Second, thereís a Web

server storing data as Web pages for your Intranet. And finally, there are browsers for viewing your Web data.

Data can include anything from production schedules to internal memos and mundane everyday office paperwork. For example,

consider you are working in a manufacturing company that runs its inventory system on a mainframe. You might want to see your inventory by category and then broken down further into stock lines. The problem you have then is that the mainframe produces inventory reports on an overnight basis which you have to distribute physically, as paper copies, to several different destinations around an office or building.

In this case, you should ideally use Microsoft® BackOffice as an intermediate data store. Using the Microsoft® SNA server, you can extract data from the mainframe and store it in an SQL Server database. You can then utilise any one of a number of report writing applications to create raw data pages for your Web server or instead, you may wish to produce a specific application to extract data from the mainframe for the Intranet and link it directly to the Web server.

Serving the Intranet

This brings us to the Intranet Web server. Web servers are to Web pages what file servers are

to files ñ they act as data stores, only a little more sophisticated. For example, you can

get Microsoftís Web server, the Internet Information Server (IIS) to interact with your data sources via the Information Server API (ISAPI). With this interface, you can construct quite complicated Web pages that execute database queries when the page is requested, giving you a completely up-to-date picture of your stock situation.

The IIS is now a key component of BackOffice and, being built on top of

Microsoft® Windows NT™ Server, it provides a robust and powerful Intranet server engine. And, importantly, the IIS also provides security ñ another vital part of an Intranet. After all, thereís little point in having an Intranet if the data it provides isnít secure. The IIS provides several levels of security that will enable you to ensure that your companyís sensitive data isnít accessed by the wrong people.

Microsoft also has a range of tools that

will allow you to manage and control your Web site from a data and presentation perspective. Next, we look in detail at how you can use Microsoftís FrontPage Web authoring and

management tools to build and manage your own Web site.

Talking the right language

Web pages are written in HyperText Markup Language (HTML). You can look at pages

written in HTML in a simple text editor like Notepad, but you may find them to be rather like Egyptian hieroglyphics.

In order to utilise and view Web pages

properly you have to use an HTML ëbrowserí. With a browser, you can look at the text and graphics which constitute a Web page and, more importantly, move around from page to page by clicking on HTML hypertext links to other Web pages.

Itís really the hypertext links that make Intranets so powerful. In an executive information system, you can view the aggregate totals for stock lines ñ cans of white paint, say ñ and move to a page displaying disaggregated totals for the number of cans of paint by size, just by clicking a mouse.

In the same way, HTML browsers give you the ability to construct complex data search and display systems simply and cheaply. The cost is reduced mainly because all the components of an Intranet are standard ëoff-the-shelfí parts. You donít need an army of expensive programmers working away for a year in order to create something thatís of real use.

Microsoftís Internet Explorer provides the ideal way to navigate your Intranet. Initially released with Microsoft® Windows® 95 last year, the Internet Explorer is now available for Windows 3.1, Windows NT 3.51 and Macintosh users as well.

Simple Intranets

It may be that you just want to use an Intranet as a better way of communicating within your company. There are plenty of instances where data isnít on a corporate mainframe, it may

be on paper only, and so inaccessible to all ñ particularly memos, reports and presentations. Intranets arenít just restricted to being front ends for mainframes or executive information systems. They can be used to provide

simple and easy access to all sorts of text or graphical data.

For example, your chief executive may have prepared a Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation of the companyís end-of-year results. With the PowerPoint Internet Assistant the entire slide show can be converted to HTML format, put out on your Intranet and viewed by

everyone in the company.

Behold the FrontPage

Building a high-quality Intranet requires good tools. Microsoft provides excellent server tools in the form of the Internet Information Server. But it also provides good client tools, and of these, FrontPage is particularly accessible.

FrontPage is an enterprise-scale Web authoring tool that offers not only a first-rate HTML editor, the FrontPage Editor, but also a Web ëlinkí browser that allows you see the connections or links between the Web pages that you create. The FrontPage Explorer has a point and click-style interface where clicking on a page or graphics icon will take you to the FrontPage Editor.

Levels of usage

Running a Web site requires a number of different skills. The overall administrator, or ëWebmasterí often has duties that concern the physical operation of the Web hardware and software ñ capacity planning and resource

allocation. At the other end, many aspects of creating an Intranet involve tasks which are nearer to writing than programming. ëAuthorsí clearly need a different level of access to the system than the Webmaster. FrontPage provides three levels of security access ñ for Webmasters, authors and users. End-users can look at, but not alter Web pages, authors can alter the

content of Web pages and create or delete them while Webmasters look after the running of the entire Web site.

With an Intranet Web site, the most important thing is to make sure that itís working

correctly, because any mistakes you make are going to be visible to a wide audience. So FrontPage provides a Personal Web Server in order that you can try out a Web site before

displaying it to a wider audience. You can also create several Webs on a server and copy one Web to another. For example, if you were running an in-house publishing system, your ëcontentí authoring team might be preparing the next dayís Web separately from the ëliveí Web. Once the new Web is ready, it can be copied over to the live Web whenever itís needed.

Turning to the FrontPage Editor, thereís a whole set of tools that make for easy editing and the production of neat, good-looking Web pages. As well as all the familiar formatting instructions such as headers, lists, tables and so on, you can insert files, images and other ëboilerplateí HTML text. Other HTML editors can do that as well, but FrontPage has a special facility that allows you to keep track of what was added. This is important if you want to avoid inadvertently deleting included text. And just to make things even easier, links between page components can be displayed graphically in the FrontPage Explorer.

Personal computers have revolutionised the way we use data in our working lives. With word processors, spreadsheets and project management tools, life in the office has changed

dramatically. But still the revolution rolls on. With Intranets distributing documents and data within the corporation, the power of Office

software to increase efficiency will be boosted radically and the days of the mainframe printout may, at long last, be numbered. M



If you, or someone in your company, still wants to grasp the basics of the Internet and Web, http://www.microsoft.com has an Internet tutorial.


One of the most useful features in FrontPage is the ToDo list. In practice, as you build a Web site youíll find dozens of small things that need fixing. FrontPage makes keeping track of these easy.


The main components of FrontPage are the Editor and the Explorer. Using these you can quickly visualise, build and manage complex Web sites.



Free and easy Internet add-ons


Microsoft has made it easy to produce HTML documents for your Intranet or Web site. You can use the powerful FrontPage Web authoring tool that weíve described. But often you may just have a memo, a spreadsheet, a database report or a presentation that youíd like to make available to a wider audience quickly.

You can do this very simply by using an Internet add-on for Microsoft® Word, Microsoft® Excel, Microsoft® PowerPoint® or Microsoft® Access. These add-ons or ëInternet Assistantsí will convert your document or spreadsheet to HTML format and even let you add hypertext links, graphics and coloured highlights as well. All you then have to do is save the resulting HTML file in the right place on the Web server ñ just like saving a file in a shared directory on a file server.

The Internet Assistants are free ñ you can download them, along with the latest version of the Internet Explorer, via Microsoftís Web site, http://www.microsoft.com/training