The Intranet: A New Concept for Corporate Information Handling.

The World Wide Web model has evolved within companies from a repository for notice boards to a new tool that can improve work productivity. Intranets, the internal or corporate internets, are likely to be the key information technology revolution for the remainder of this century. The intranet concept is derived from the present Internet as a natural step in its own evolution. The same TCP/IP communication protocols and applications are used, in particular the Web server/client model. This paper gives first the rationale for setting up corporate intranets, providing the main reasons why the Internet technologies are having such a remarkable impact on the scope of business networking applications and why intranets are becoming so popular among a broad variety of companies. Secondly, the key distinctive functional features of internets are presented. A discussion on typical intranet applications follows: the new functionality offered to business people and other non-typical information technology users is stressed, and significant differences with existing groupware solutions are discussed. The paper concludes by outlining a practical ongoing project to digitize documents (thus reducing the need for printed materials and allowing the inclusion of multimedia contents) which can be delivered to each desktop and accessed by all individuals of an organization in a cost-effective, flexible and friendly way through an intranet Web interface. (Author) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** The Intranet: A New Concept for Corporate Information Handling "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY