You don't need that you need this, because it's a turbo charged, 16 valve, GTI, widescreen, Ultra, limited addition, new improved, tasty alternative, state of the art version of what you paid an arm and a leg for last month, but we need to sell some more so we've put the marketing department on it and they've come up with this drivel!. What am I talking about, well it's obvious the intranet. The so called new alternative saviour of the corporate world and cash cow for the software industry.
The intranet is the latest buzzword used to describe private company internets, which are becoming the cool thing for the company 'sandals' to drone on about in IT meetings. How do they work?, well they work like the internet, the difference being that the files are held on a company's private server and are not accessible to the outside world, either through the use of firewalls or, as is more common, by not connecting them to the internet in the first place.
For the 90's company wishing to improve internal communications they bring all the advantages of email, shared files and internet style publishing to the desk top, without the cost associated with dedicated systems such as Notes or eXchange. And the software companies are all falling over themselves to tell their customers what they're doing about this latest, greatest technology. Magazines are gagging to write articles about it (I think I qualify as a hypocrite here) and case studies about happy and satisfied intranet users are stuffing the in-trays of features editors up and down the computer publishing world.
At the heart of all the hype are companies like Netscape and Microsoft who have realised that by adding some additional features and re-packaging existing software they can tap an as yet untouched corporate internet market. Whether or not there is any value in these re-packaged version is something that the corporate IT buyer must carefully consider. Netscape is proposing to bolt it's recently aquired workgroup software, Collabra, into Nestcape 2.0. This will give the eagerly awaited new version of the browser full email and newsgroup capabilities as well as user authentication, and will in the longer term develop the email components to provide fully threaded group discussions and forums.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is using the Intranet hype to promote Internet assistant as a means of aiding corporate users of intranets to debelop and manage HTML pages , through it's integration with all MS Office products.
Mike Homer, the vice president of Netscpae marketing ahs been quoted in the US technology press as saying that about 70 per cent of Netscapes $20.8 million third quarter revenues were from 'corporate' companies setting up internal 'Intranets'. This is clearly big business for Netscape, which now has an obligation to keep it's recently acquired shareholders happy with the revenues.
Products like Notes and exchange, whilst older, are also more sophisticated, and the product of years of work group experience and offer many more features than simple file sharing and email facilities. Notes for example is a sophisitceted text retrieval and indexing tool in it's own right and this has given many users their first real experience of applications development, which has fueled a creative approach to many problems the system department thought un solvable or not worth the trouble. The incorporation of workgroup tools like Collabra in the Netscape browser will bring many of these advantages to the typical users desktop, but if it is the right solution remains to be seen.
Analysts are already buying the hype and are predicting the death of Notes and Exchange, but the fact of the matter is that the jury is still out and many of the largest Intranet users are using 3xisting versions of Netscape and other browsers are part of their internal set up. Whetehr they need specific products is debatable, and whetehr these products should be bought from browser companies rather than established workgroup software firms is as yet unsure. One thing that is for sure though is that if you rush into you will definitely cost your company money as the today's fad can often become tomorrows flop.
